The fifth day is what makes Test cricket unique

When England beat South Africa in the last hour of the fifth and final day of the second Test in Cape Town, they blended such attacking weapons as reverse-swinging fast bowling and spinners turning the ball from the rough to achieve their victory.

The Proteas, in turn, responded with the sort of grim obduracy that makes batting for survival such a gripping spectacle.

Every delivery could be a potential wicket, a looming disaster, and the tension is ratcheted up to levels normally only seen in the best of horror movies.

Having a fifth day is what makes Test cricket absolutely unique; as Indian ODI great Rohit Sharma pointed out this week: “If it is a four-day, it is not a Test match. Four-day means a first-class match. It is as simple as that.”

The physical and mental endurance needed to go five days cannot be replicated anywhere else and the longest format also necessitates a special suit of skills.

Batsmen have to deal with things like reverse-swing and large patches of rough created by the bowlers’ footmarks; bowlers have to contend with third or fourth spells and innings that last more than 120 overs.

It is surely to the game’s benefit that there is a mix of formats played at the highest level – from the instant gratification of T20 cricket to the long-haul marathon of Tests, with ODIs having become a hybrid in-between the two extremes.

Changing Test cricket to four days would kill off a certain style of player, some of whom were considered amongst the sport’s all-time greats.

The most obvious ones to suffer and be threatened with extinction would be those solid batsmen who can occupy the crease all day – four-day Tests would surely not feature the sort of heroics we saw from Dominic Sibley and Dean Elgar at Newlands.

Spinners would also be an endangered species.

Denied the deterioration of a fifth-day pitch and with teams surely favouring the quick-fix of green wickets and pace bowlers, the sight of a wily slow bowler craftily spinning his web for over-after-over will be gone.

The best sports are those that encourage a mix of skills and physical attributes; it has always been rugby’s great strength and moves in the northern hemisphere (strangely enough only after the Springboks won the World Cup) to minimise the impact of the scrum are a similar attack on the very soul of the game as four-day Tests.

In Cape Town, we went into the final hour of the last day even though there had been no time lost to inclement weather in the preceding four days.

Both batting units also under-performed in their first innings – England scoring 269 in just 91.5 overs and South Africa making just 223 in 89 overs.

The point is, many Test matches, especially in places like England or New Zealand, even India if one gets too close to monsoon season, are weather-affected and in this age of big bats and demoralised bowlers, bigger scores are now the norm.

I foresee many more drawn Test matches in future if four-day Tests do become mandatory.

That last word is vital because I have no objection to four-day Tests becoming voluntary, but it should be left up to the two countries involved to decide.

The reasons for the four-day Test proposal, which comes from the suits, once again showing how divorced they all seem to be from the true soul of the game, and has been widely rejected by the players, are ostensibly to open up the playing calendar a bit and to save the money spent on preparing stadia for five days, when more games are finishing in four.

The suspicion, and this seems to be the reason why Fica, the international players’ union, are anxious about the proposal, is that the change would just be in order to allow The “Big Three” of England, Australia and India to implement their plans of a new “super series” between themselves.

The fact that the players, who are being offered more time off and perhaps better earning opportunities in the shorter formats, are rejecting four-day Tests shows in how much esteem the five-day game is held.

The opposition of such luminaries of cricket as Virat Kohli, Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Andrew Strauss, Sharma, Faf du Plessis and Ben Stokes must surely count for more than the temptations of making a quick buck.

Ken Borland is a senior sports writer at The Citizen.

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