Woakes's heroism proves long-form cricket remains the real game

Telegraph

2 hours ago

As Chris Woakes showed at The Oval today – going out to bat with a dislocated shoulder hoping to help England stave off defeat by India – cricket occasionally turns up heroism rare in other sports.
Woakes was not the first injured player to put his country before himself: Colin Cowdrey famously went out to bat in the closing minutes of the Lord's test against West Indies in 1963 with an arm in plaster, his wrist broken by a vicious bouncer from Wes Hall. Like Woakes, Cowdrey did not need to face a ball, but his guts in going out to the middle, like Woakes's, is undeniable and inspirational.
The overall result of the series that finished today – 2-2 with one draw – fairly reflected the capacities of the two teams. However, England, chasing 374 to win, were at one point 332 for 4 and cruising to victory, yet India's attack relentlessly pursued them until the tourists obtained an unlikely triumph.
Some of the dismissals that caused England to lose were from exceptional bowling; others were from batting unsuitable to a five-day match in which more than two days remained to score the runs needed to win.
This brings us to the paradox of this Test series. As one of the most closely contested since the 2005 Ashes summer, it has excited public interest in serious long-form cricket in a fashion that has been lacking for years.
Yet from today, and for the next few weeks, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) will be trumpeting its Hundred competition, in which each side has only 100 balls in which to slog its way to a higher total than its opponents.
In the literal sense, it isn't really cricket: but the people who run the ECB have decided that it is a means of getting more people interested in the game. It is a little like feeding people on tripe and expecting them to move on naturally to fillet steak.
The superfluity of short-form cricket – not merely The Hundred but the slightly longer T20 competitions that now proliferate around the world – certainly does pull in crowds, but there is no evidence that these people transfer to the four- or five-day game.
What these competitions do achieve is to take the best players away from county cricket's first-class matches, thus making them remarkably unattractive for the public to go to watch. If you are more or less guaranteed not to see any players of international quality, why bother?
Also, when players have so little recent first-class experience – such as Jacob Bethell, in the side at the Oval – they fall into the habits of the one-day slogfest, and make silly mistakes that lose matches.
The ECB, tin-eared though it has long been, ought to see in the enthusiasm with which this Test series has been received that there is a renewed public appetite for the longer, more thoughtful game.
Instead of further truncating the championship programme and marginalising it more by keeping international players out of it, the competition should be given more priority, marketed better and used to re-train Test cricketers in the art of playing long-form cricket.
Woakes's heroism was a reminder of the difference between consequential and inconsequential cricket. The public have shown they want more of the former – and it would make better players too.