The romance of Test cricket dissipates in game of numbers

The proposal for surnames and numbers to feature on the shirts of Test cricketers is an antithesis to the aesthetics of the game.

Sometimes, in an atmosphere of groupthink, of lack of accountability, of short-term expedient, people in cricket make crassly spur-of-the-moment decisions that harm the game in ways they scarcely understand.

But enough about the initiative from Cricket Australia and the England Cricket Board this week for Test cricketers to wear names and numbers on their shirts; let’s talk about Sandpapergate, whose first anniversary falls tomorrow. Actually, I’ll track back to the former in due course ….

Look out, inevitably, for numerous retellings of that fateful week at Cape Town and Johannesburg, including rescreenings of that footage and those press conferences, which still somehow never fail to shock.

In financial terms, once the commercial income forgone is laid alongside the matches not played and the brand damage inflicted, the penalties on Steve Smith and David Warner were probably the heaviest ever levied on Australian athletes.

Were they too heavy? In his new book, Mike Brearley sets the Australians’ misdeeds against match fixing, and draws the comparison between “minor shoplifting” and “aggravated burglary”.

Future generations trying to make sense of it all, however, should not overlook the various aggravating factors, such as the nonchalance and gormlessness of the slide into malpractice, the crudity of the use of sandpaper, the sense of the perpetrators being caught “in the act’’. It was not just what was done; it was the way.

We are apt to complain about sporting delinquencies being played down and covered up — damn the spin doctors and their wiles!

Here the gruesome fascination lay in two ill-prepared athletes trying to fix the problem they’d created, and worsening it with their every answer. Smith’s concluding remark, a blithe response to the question of whether he was the right man for the Australian captaincy, proved integral to his losing it.

One question barely posed since, let alone answered, remains: where were the managers? Asleep at their posts in South Africa, asleep in bed in Australia, it would seem.

It’s hardly as though the incident came from nowhere; the series had taken angry, bitter, destructive turns. But the controversy became a crisis, within twelve hours a catastrophe, and after twelve months remains a cause célèbre, because of sins of omission as well as commission.

These run deep too. What was instructive about the intensity of the ensuing indignation was how stored up it felt — how in their fury with the specific the public made known its dissatisfaction with the general.

In fact, soundings about the profile and popularity of the national team had been discouraging for some time. Cricket Australia ignored this. High performance counted Smith’s runs, commercial counted bucket hats; the executive paid themselves bonuses and the board lapped up their perquisites. When it came to qualitative rather than quantitative judgment, there was little will or imagination to question cricket’s direction.

But don’t take my word for this: consult the Ethics Centre’s unsparing review of CA, which was found to be “arrogant and controlling’’, perceived to “say one thing and do another”, and understood to be a place “where people struggle to say ‘no’ to people in positions of power and influence”.

Has this changed? Maybe a little. Some quietly constructive changes have occurred at Jolimont in the last few months, as well as more visibly in the national team. But then comes news such as that with which this column opened — the mooted departure from 142 years of playing Test cricket in unblemished white.

It has not been formally announced, merely trailed by a newspaper, perhaps to test the waters.

It is advocated by no individual. It addresses no significant problem, responds to no identifiable groundswell.

It is justified by reference to principles of “fan engagement”: it offers the prospect of replica gear money; it is part of bringing Test cricket into line with other sports because …. well, because everything must be in line with everything else or who knows where we are, eh?

It has involved no process of consultation, encountered no contestation. So let’s give it some.

Test cricket is not merely a great game, but a beautiful sight with an exquisite and unimprovable palette — subtle, restrained and abiding.

Among other things, the similarity of the whiteclad figures symbolises the blend of personalities and skills into a team whole and the following of players in timeless succession. Part of Test cricket’s appeal is that its duration allows an attentive spectator to learn to identify a player by the way they stand, interact, gesture.

There’s nothing particularly highbrow about this, by the way; it’s simply anti-obvious, anti-stupid. But maybe I can put it more succinctly. OK here goes. Numbers and names on white clothing. Look. Like. Shit.

What’s proposed, then, is an initiative from which a minuscule degree of accessibility will be gained at an aesthetic and cultural cost which nobody will trouble to calculate because it cannot be reduced to dollars and cents.

It will alienate the sizeable portion of Test cricket’s actual audience that is attached to its charm, romance and anachronism to cater for a fantasy audience hardly likely to develop a taste for Test cricket because of such cosmetic tinkering. It’s like getting down with the kids by getting Australian cricketers to wear their baggy greens backwards.

And far from “building the profile” of players, as CA argued last week in a statement to which nobody was prepared to put their name, what could be a greater effacement of cricketers’ individuality than encouraging spectators to identify them not by how they look or play but by a number?

So this is cricket administration circa 2019, imposing capricious, tone-deaf changes that nobody asked for while brushing over issues that actually matter. That, for example, went on treating ball maintenance on a nod and wink basis until Super Sport’s cameras declined to do either, then shut the stable door after the bolting horses had been suspended for a year.

That is all about accountability for players, but otherwise cowers behind committees, corporate voices and commercial confidentialities. That will reincorporate Smith and Warner into the Test fold at Lord’s in August, and somehow thinks that sticking numbers and names on their backs will enrich the experience. And that, frankly, poses a greater threat to cricket than either of them.