I borrowed the title of this post (Cordon's editorial staff write titles to contributions. This is a common practice across publications) somewhat presumptuously from a book by Dipesh Chakrabarty.
I have reproduced the post below the fold.
The Ashes lie at the center of Test cricket’s origin myth. A satirical obituary of English cricket appeared in the Sporting Times of London in 1882 after Australia beat England at the Oval. Australia’s “demon” bowler Frederick Robert Spofforth took 14/90 in the match and the visitors won by 7 runs. Oddly, calling Test Cricket’s marquee series the Ashes means that it is being played between England and Australia for the Ashes of English cricket, or perhaps for the urn containing them.
It was a low scoring game, to put it mildly. It must also have been deadly boring. Australia batted first and made 63 all out in 80 overs. England replies with a mammoth 101 all out in 71.3 overs. The visitors then fairly raced to 122 all out in only 63 overs. H. H. Massie, Charles Bannerman’s opening partner made a Sehwagian 55 in only 60 balls. After Massie was first out with the Australian score on 60 the remaining 9 wickets collapsed (or did they?) for a further 62 runs. Set 85 in the 4th innings, England were all out for 77. Typically, an Englishman flirted vigorously with the margins of the spirit of the game, as Cowdrey and Dexter would have said later. In Australia’s 2nd innings, W. G. Grace whipped off the bails after Sammy Jones, a 21 year old batsman who batted at 10 and 8 in the two innings, left his crease to do a bit of gardening after completing a single. Grace appealed for the run out, and the Umpire gave it out. You see, Jones and his captain William Lloyd Murdoch had put on 15 for the 7th wicket after Australia had collapsed from 0/60 to 6/99. The good doctor Grace’s upper class amateur desperation was unsurprising, especially given that it was only a game against the “Colonists” as the visitors were referred to in Wisden’s report that year. The Almanack commented at length on this episode -
Such are the beginnings of Cricket’s longest standing rivalry. It has been a peculiar rivalry in that very few series have been competitive. The vast majority of Ashes series have found one of three conditions – decisive Australian superiority, decisive English superiority, or weakness in equal measure on both sides which made stalemates inevitable. The latter was the rule in the 1960s. Competitive Ashes series have been rare, and when they occur, are talked about for years. Come what may every four years England tour Australia and every four years Australia return the favor. With an increasing number of teams vying for spots on the international calendar, the Ashes use up a lot of time and space, much like an old, inefficient handmade limousine on a contemporary city street. The chart below shows the extent to which the Ashes dominate the Test playing commitments of England and Australia.
At 114 Jones was run out in a way which gave great dissatisfaction to Murdoch and other Australians. Murdoch played a ball to leg, for which Lyttelton ran. The ball was returned, and Jones having completed the first run, and thinking wrongly, but very naturally, that the ball was dead, went out of his ground. Grace put his wicket down, and the umpire gave him out. Several of the team spoke angrily of Grace's action, but the compiler was informed that after the excitement had cooled down a prominent member of Australian eleven admitted that he should have done the same thing had he been in Grace's place. There was a good deal of truth in what a gentleman in the pavilion remarked, amidst some laughter, that Jones ought to thank the champion for teaching him something.Of course there was. The ‘Colonists’ initial reaction could only have come due to a temporary ignorance of the rules in the heat of battle, as opposed to the cool of the pavilion. The visitors reaction to Dr. Grace’s actions could not possibly have been because those actions were at the very fringe (or even past this fringe) of accepted cricketing conduct at the time.
Such are the beginnings of Cricket’s longest standing rivalry. It has been a peculiar rivalry in that very few series have been competitive. The vast majority of Ashes series have found one of three conditions – decisive Australian superiority, decisive English superiority, or weakness in equal measure on both sides which made stalemates inevitable. The latter was the rule in the 1960s. Competitive Ashes series have been rare, and when they occur, are talked about for years. Come what may every four years England tour Australia and every four years Australia return the favor. With an increasing number of teams vying for spots on the international calendar, the Ashes use up a lot of time and space, much like an old, inefficient handmade limousine on a contemporary city street. The chart below shows the extent to which the Ashes dominate the Test playing commitments of England and Australia.
Periods have been defined by calendar year. Pakistan became the 7th Test playing nation in 1952, joining England, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, West Indies and India. In 1970, South Africa were banned. In 1982, Sri Lanka became a Test playing team. In 1992, Zimbabwe joined and South Africa returned. In 2000, Bangladesh became a Test playing team.
Since the end of World War II, anywhere from a third to two fifths of the Tests played by England and Australia have been Ashes Tests. Since the advent of the Future Tours Program and the ICC in its contemporary form, this share has fallen to about a quarter. But this decline has to be seen in the light of an increase in Test teams. If England played 36 Tests against all Test teams in the nearly 14 years since January 2000, they would have played about 325 Tests during this period. If the larger number of Test teams is taking into account, then Ashes Tests continue to be about twice as frequent as they would be if England and Australia played Test cricket equally against all Test playing teams. Gains due to the FTP remain marginal.
The standard argument for this preferential distribution of Tests has been that it is what the public wants to see. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the West Indies were invited to play a lot of Test Cricket. Since 2000, their share has dropped, while India’s share of Test Matches has risen. To some extent this is due to the decline in the West Indies Test team and the contemporaneous improvement in the Indian team.
While a review of the number of Tests suggests that Ashes contests occur more frequently than they might in a more equitable Test calendar, the problem is not merely one of numbers. The BCCI justified its decision to invite West Indies for a series in India this month by arguing that without the West Indies tour, they would have no more international cricket for the remainder of the 2013-14 Home season. This is a genuine problem in the future tours program (FTP). While the English and Australian seasons are an established part of the international calendar, all other tours have to be arranged around these commitments. With the advent of windows for T20 cricket (including IPL), this calendar has shrunk even more. While the IPL is rightly blamed as one of the reasons for smaller Test nations being unable to have a designated time of the year when they play home Tests, the established Test schedules of England and Australia are another even more longstanding reason.
Given the way England and Australia organize their home seasons (to a lesser extent, South Africa as well) and their Ashes calendar, it is currently nearly impossible for other sides to have full tours of either England or Australia. Unless the 5 Test tour is abolished, it will be impossible to abolish the 2 Test tour. Sadly, instead of being a voice for equity at the ICC, the current FTP suggests that India have joined England and Australia in the self-serving mini-club at the top of the ICC. It is not surprising that when the BCCI combined its desire to host Sachin Tendulkar’s 200th Test in India with a desire to teach Cricket South Africa a lesson by objecting to its choice of CEO, the English and Australian boards were conspicuously silent.
The Ashes contest shows that quality is not necessarily an important ingredient in a successful rivalry. The Australians thumped England in the Ashes from 1989 to 2002-03. In the last 3 series, England have won, at first by breaking a stalemate in the final Test of 2009, and then quite comprehensively in 2010-11 and 2013. Similar periods of dominance (mainly Australia) are to be found earlier in the 20th century as well. The ICC justifies giving its members a relatively free hand in determining the length of their bilateral series by pointing to the demands of the market. This is exactly backwards. Frequent contests are the surest way to long lasting and lucrative rivalries. Kerry Packer got interested in broadcasting cricket because it was already available every single summer.
Frequent contests are also the surest way of developing quality Test teams. If West Indies, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe and Pakistan are going to continually get 2 Test series because longer series are not as lucrative, then these teams will surely decline. It is the ICC’s central responsibility to ensure that these teams do not decline. Producing an iron clad calendar which serves the interest of all teams and not just India, England and Australia is the first step in fulfilling this responsibility. It is self-defeating to argue that 5 Ashes Tests cannot be reduced to 4 because the Ashes are popular. The ICC’s job is to help Bangladesh v England be as popular as Australia v England. This will take time, perhaps as long as a generation. But the ICC exists precisely to fulfill such difficult, long term ambitions.
The ICC must provincialize the Ashes instead of falling into the trap of seeing them as Test Cricket’s marquee contest. Currently, the ICC’s attitude to Test Cricket’s lesser teams (from Pakistan downwards) is a lot like Wisden’s imperial attitude towards the young ‘colonist’ batsman from the Oval Test of 1882 – a mixture of paternalism and condescension. On the one hand the ICC’s policies leave most of the details of organizing bilateral series, including the financial part, to the participating teams, leaving them to fend for themselves. On the other, the ICC insists that they follow detailed playing conditions strictly. The FTP has given in to every existing bias that broadcasters and advertisers might have about the marketability of games. All this will do is to perpetuate these imbalances. The ICC must insist on a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 4 Tests per series, across the board. It must insist that every single Test playing nation have a fixed window in the year to host 2 series per year, and require all the established teams to make adjustments in their calendars to permit this. It makes business sense in the long term to invest in this and make sure that Test Cricket has a larger number of competitive contests and rivalries to offer. The only way to have this is to allow more teams to play more Tests.
If Cricket is to survive as a sport, the ICC must run it as a sport. A good place to start would be to ensure that all teams play more of less the same amount of Test Cricket. I agree that the T20 windows carved out by BCCI hurt the Test calendar. But it is equally true, and less frequently pointed out, that long Ashes tours, which prevent a second full tour (of at least 3 Tests) being played in England and Australia every 4th summer, and also prevent England and Australia touring for a second full tour every Ashes summer, is another, longer standing challenge for the Test calendar.