Two-day Test match? Celebrate don't denigrate.

Sporting contests can be at their most compelling and thrilling when the unexpected is happening - it is one of the reasons the early rounds of the FA Cup attract such interest. Wycombe Wanderers against Manchester United is not simply the attraction of the underdog, it is the prospect of the previously unseen.

When Joe Root said after England’s astonishing defeat in the third Test against India in Ahmedabad that people “didn’t come to see me take 5-8, they wanted to see the best against the best” he couldn’t have been more wrong.

There was considerable false modesty in the England captain’s comment (he takes his bowling far more seriously than many people realise) and it was a back-handed slap-down of the pitch, but seeing one of the world’s best batsmen taking 5-8 is exactly the kind of unexpected occurrence that Test cricket watchers want to see.

To be fair to Root and his team, none of them complained about conditions at the Sarda Patel Stadium. Not publicly. There was enough of that coming from former players and supporters. The problem with that is twofold: Former players reflect the conditions and situations they wanted to play in and supporters are merely aggrieved at the result.

When both groups suggest that the pitch and result – the shortest Test since the second World War – were ‘bad’ for Test cricket, and that new followers would be hard to find, the reality, I suggest, could be quite the opposite.

The long-held belief that Test cricket should follow a set-pattern is as out-of-date and even as politically incorrect as notions of a ‘classic’ body-shape. Batsmen hold sway for the first two days, there is some pace and bounce for the faster bowlers for the first three days, and the spinners finally take the stage for the last day-and-a-half. As Ravichandran Ashwin said after the third Test: “Who said that? Who wrote this ‘perfect’ Test match?”

As much as cricket has changed over the years, it has stayed the same. The Anglo/Australia axis by which the game was, and is still defined, is over. Whether supporters of Anglo-Saxon heritage agree or not is irrelevant. The game is dominated by India in every respect.

The value and intensity of the entertainment packed into those five sessions of the third Test was as compelling as I have been privileged to see in over 300 Test matches of writing and commentating. Offered a ‘traditional’ day on which Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane bat 70 overs at a run rate of 2.8 and either of the two days we witnessed in Ahmedabad, there is no doubt which would attract the previously uninitiated viewer.

I don’t recall boxing ‘purists’ complaining when a young Mike Tyson burst onto the heavyweight boxing scene and knocked everybody out inside two rounds. Where was the moaning about the ‘traditional’ way of conducting a 15-round bout with lots of defensive sparring, jabbing and clinching? Tyson even attracted viewers who found the sport largely repellent.

Davis Cup tennis has one of the proudest records of manipulating home conditions in all of sport. If the opposition are weak on grass, get the fertiliser on it. If they’re hopeless on clay, use the slowest court in the country. Build a new one if you have to. Polish the hard court until it shines if that’s the way the home team thinks it can win.

Golf isn’t far behind, especially in team events like the Ryder and President’s Cup. Short tees and narrow fairways to negate big hitters, hard, slick greens to counter the graduates of the American ‘target golf’ College circuit. It’s the reason so many of them don’t bother trying to qualify for The Open Championship, the oldest and finest tournament in the game’s history.

The great Sir Vivian Richards fired up on Instagram a couple of days ago (taking to it like a duck to tarmac) but delivering some pertinent lines: “It’s time to stop the moaning and complaining, when you go to ‘spin land’ then you got to expect the ball to spin. It has always spun in India and it always will. Batsmen, you’ve just got to find a way to stay in and score runs.”

The only regret about the third Test is that we couldn’t see more of it, but that had far more to do with the poor batting from both sides and the pink ball than the pitch. In order to protect the dye and keep the ball pink for as close to 90 overs as possible, extra layers of lacquer are applied which keeps it harder for much longer than a conventional red ball. It skidded off the pitch quicker than usual playing tricks with batsmen’s muscle memory and exposing poor techniques.

It was never, ever a 112 and 81 all out pitch. It was a 250-run pitch which should have seen the match extended deep into the third day or even fourth morning and attracting far less criticism and derision. There was never going to be a lack of interest in the fourth Test between these two countries, but it’s sky-high now because of what happened a week ago. Another ‘spinning’ pitch is guaranteed.

Once in a while cricket needs to take a step back and a deep breath, and stop taking itself so seriously and believing it is so different to the rest of the sports world. Nobody wants two-day Tests regularly, but celebration rather than denigration seems far more appropriate when they do come along.

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