Cricket’s absurd championship

Nine in the morning, and Oval station is heaving. People are spilling out of trains and pressing along the narrow platforms, shuffling up and out towards the street. The announcer takes a break from repeating his plea for everyone to “please be patient on the escalators”, and mutters “four more days of this” underneath his breath. “Five” a passerby tells him with a smile, “if we lose a day for rain”. The platform man rolls his eyes. But they’re a happy crowd, bound by anticipation, and buoyed by the knowledge that the forecast is good, and there is a full day ahead.

“I remember when they first introduced the Test championship we weren’t really sure what relevance it would have,” Mitchell Starc said in the days before this game started. Almost everyone in the sport felt that way.

That first World Test Championship final, played at the Rose Bowl back in the middle of the pandemic, seems, now, like a half-forgotten fragment of some weird fever dream. Six soggy days of intermittent play in front of 4,000 people at a business hotel by a retail park five miles outside Southampton, in which New Zealand, who have since been trounced by England, India and Bangladesh, somehow ended up proving themselves the best team in the world and a lot of clever-clever journalists wrote long articles about how they had cracked Test cricket.

For Starc, just watching that match was enough to make him want to play in one himself. “When we missed out on the first one, it was like, well, there we go, we want to be there, right?” Australia would have made it that year if they hadn’t been docked four points for a slow over rate in a Test against India. The fact there was a title to win, and that, of all teams, New Zealand had won it instead of them, was all the context they needed to make sense of this competition. “Now it’s about whether it has that relevance for the fans, and the next generation that’s coming through.”

The championship is, in many ways, perfectly absurd. It excludes three of the Test teams, and has a league table that even ardent followers of the sport tend to ignore until the later stages, when it finally becomes clear who is actually winning the thing. But then Test cricket is a brilliantly silly game. And standing in line along Harleyford Road, squeezing in between all the Indian fans posing for photos in front of the ground, stepping around the heavy bags stuffed with picnics and tiffin tins they had left resting on the ground, none of that much mattered. The sun was out, the crowd was in, and the game was on.

Travis Head and Steve Smith scamper for runs for Australia against India. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Australia v India on a sunny London summer’s day sells itself. And the atmosphere at the Oval was, like that at the recent one-day series between Ireland and Bangladesh in Chelmsford, another reminder that there is an audience for a sport in this country that has been mostly neglected by the England and Wales Cricket Board. The picture that is most often painted of English cricket is at odds with the one you see on occasions like this, or at any of the matches involving India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan at the World Cup in 2019.

The ground crackled and fizzed. The opening overs had an immediate intensity, Mohammed Shami worked over David Warner from one end, Mohammed Siraj bombarded Usman Khawaja at the other. Warner, his career on the line, bristled, bobbed and weaved, swayed away from the short balls that spat off the pitch up at his chin like a boxer dodging jabs. He was beaten, over and again, and the crowd booed and jeered and hooted as the ball whistled by his nose, or shot off his edge and down to the ground in front of the slips, or wide of the wicketkeeper, Srikar Bharat.

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It was Khawaja who went, caught behind off a drive about which, you guess, he will have told himself later that he should have known better than to play so early in the day. In came Marnus Labuschagne, and he had a hard time of it too. He was hit twice on his right hand, so badly the first time that he threw his bat as if it all of a sudden had an electric current running through it. But there is a steeliness to this Australian team, Travis Head seized the day with a flurry of runs, 146 at almost a run-a-ball, while Steve Smith dug in at the other end to end the day five short of a century.

Soon enough, it was all feeling a little ominous, for India, yes, and – one eye on the Ashes – for England too. So the tenor of the crowd was a little different on the way out, still contented, despite the day’s frustrations, and the chatter full of intrigue and speculation about what will happen next, in the days ahead and on to the summer beyond. It is shaping up to be a good one.