August 2005

Great expectations. This is the eve of the fourth test match between England and Australia to be played at Trent Bridge, Nottingham, over the next five days. The series is tied at 1-1. If Australia win the fourth test they will retain the Ashes. England have not seen this sort of support since Botham's Ashes in 1981. Australia have met a team that matches them for talent, determination, planning and courage.

The Old Trafford draw was a great result for the series and it came about through a wonderfully brave last innings performance from the Aussie, in particular from their captain.

Now there is everything to play for. Forget the one day games and 20/20 slogs. It is this test series that will be remembered for years to come.

In today's Guardian Mike Marqusee explains the absorbing drama of a great test series.

An epic evolution

In an era of instant gratification, a 25-day Test series is still one of the supreme forms of spectator sport

Mike Marqusee
Wednesday August 24, 2005
The Guardian

Six hours in a day's play. Five days' play in a Test. Five Tests in a series. Twenty-five days of cricket spread out over two months. Both teams outfitted in white. Surely there can't be room for such an elegant, elongated exercise in a society addicted to instant gratification? Surely what 21st-century punters want is something orgiastic and abbreviated, such as the Twenty20 game introduced by the cricket authorities, whose market researchers told them people found the traditional version "boring".

The astounding cricket played by England and Australia has not only rejuvenated the 123-year-old Ashes competition, it's also demonstrated that the five-Test series is one of the supreme forms of spectator sport available on earth. Yes, it takes inordinate time. Much action appears inconclusive. As bat and ball spar, clash and quibble, hour after hour, there are grey areas aplenty. Precisely because of those grey areas, the drama can be raised to a higher pitch and a greater complexity.

Like any epic entertainment, full-blown Test cricket varies in tone and tempo. It's full of episodes, characters, subplots. (Will the Aussies master reverse swing? Will wicketkeeper Geraint Jones end the summer as hero or villain? Will Matthew Hayden stop glowering?) Its climactic moments are the result of long-gestated conflicts, the distillation of interlocking strengths and weaknesses.

After this year's Old Trafford Test, we're less likely to hear cracks from cricket-phobes about "boring draws". Many draws are boring. But the possibility of the draw activates cricket's dramatic equation of runs, wickets and time - the vectors converging, the knot tightening, ball by ball, as witnessed at Birmingham and Manchester.

Sport is at its most compelling when it's closely contested at a high level of skill. Muhammad Ali was lucky to have opponents almost as great as he was, notably Frazier and Foreman. And like a great boxing match, this summer's Ashes series has been fought toe to toe, punch followed by counter-punch. Both sides have found themselves on the floor and both have risen from the dead.

This is Test cricket played in the new style: fast-scoring and athletic. The game has evolved. It's not a museum piece. It's alive.

And it lives because at its core is a wonderfully spontaneous interplay between the individual and the collective. As CLR James observed in the irreplaceable Beyond a Boundary, the bowler v batsman confrontation "reproduces the central action which characterises all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own: two individuals pitted against each other in a conflict that is strictly personal but no less representative of a social group".

Test cricket demands a spectrum of skills and temperaments. Under its wide umbrella, personalities reveal multiple facets. Opponents probe each other, meet challenge with counter-challenge. To succeed in a five-Test series, you must master a steep learning curve.

In the past two Tests, the intensity and application of the cricketers was ferocious. Yet alongside the heroics there's been brittleness and fragility. Safe hands on either side have dropped easy catches. In this complex game, any number of things can go unexpectedly wrong.

It's a cricket cliche that a hard-fought series becomes above all a test of character. Undoubtedly, with skill, fitness and luck so finely balanced, the psychological element comes to the fore. But "character" is too pat and one-dimensional to describe what must be going on in these guys' heads. It certainly won't account for Shane Warne. Playing for a side on the ropes, as he has rarely been required to do in the past, the great confounder has exceeded even his own myth - and this time with bat as well as ball. Savour this final summer of Warne. He's unique. And his uniqueness could find a platform only in cricket.

As an ongoing event, the Ashes series radiates outwards, drawing in an audience beyond the grounds, the giant screen in Hyde Park or the viewers at home and in the pubs. The plot is picked up via headlines, news bulletins, overheard conversations. It circulates like a soap opera, but unlike a soap it has the existential virtue of being unpredictable and unrepeatable. People are being drawn in not by hype, but by the extraordinary nature of events on the field.

Thus an entertainment invented in an era characterised by long-vanished work and leisure patterns resonates in a new age - which suggests that it offers us something we can't find elsewhere. Test cricket is capacious, an antidote to the contrived claustrophobia of Big Brother.

If England were playing their customary three-Test series against Pakistan, India or Sri Lanka, the show would now be over - and who'd be satisfied with that? There are still so many questions unanswered. We've had a breather. Tomorrow the spectacle resumes. As playwrights know, the hardest thing is a great second act. But there's every reason to hope that only rain can dampen this drama.

· Mike Marqusee's Anyone But England: an Outsider Looks at English Cricket is published by Aurum Press