In November this year, when Australia plays New Zealand, the Adelaide Oval will also play host to cricket’s newest innovation: the day-night test match. The ball, specially designed by Kookaburra, will be pink. The clothing will remain white, but at least half the day’s play will take place under artificial lights.

The event would represent a culmination of a series of trials carried out with the pink ball both at the Sheffield Shield, Australia’s premier domestic competition, and the hallowed Marylebone Cricket Club, owner of the Lord’s cricket ground. But are day-night test matches a necessary development? Does cricket’s longer form need this kind of rejuvenation?

For us fans, the unique rhythms of test cricket, which we so relish, have as much to do with its quirky structure, which allows a game played over five full days to end in a draw, as its daily timetable. The thought of watching test matches played under lights, therefore, represents an abomination. In our minds, the purity of test cricket derives from its sense of traditionalism. The start of play in the middle of the morning, a break for lunch, a lazy second session, followed by a halt for tea, and then, under creeping shadows, a final foray.

To those unaccustomed to these rituals of test cricket, the form will almost certainly seem an archaism, unsuited to the rapidity of modern-day life. But, much like people who view test matches as a mere vestige of the past, even those of us who are continuously beguiled by its infinite dynamics have, at some point or the other, worried about its demise. After all, during Kerry Packer’s World Series revolution in the late 1970s, many fans thought the death knell had already sounded for test matches. But here we are, nearly four decades later, not only ruminating over the same concerns but also contemplating changes that might alter the core of the game, as we know it.

That the present apprehensions are more real than before doesn’t have much to do with test cricket itself, or its ability to survive on its own. It concerns, rather, the shifting attentions of the game’s administrators. The advent of Twenty-20 cricket, and its ability to produce raw and unbridled entertainment, if not always sport, has meant that cricket’s governing bodies now have a veritable cash cow to help fill their coffers. We may not want to begrudge them that opportunity. But our problems begin when they view test cricket as a product for sale.

The decision to introduce day-night test matches would be welcome if it had something to do with improving the quality of the sport, in terms of making it fairer, or more riveting, ensuring, for instance, a more balanced battle between the bat and the ball. But the move is clearly aimed predominantly at capturing the prime-time television market. It seems to have almost nothing to do with the sport, and everything to do with business. As the New Zealand Herald reported, it took prize money of $1 million and a seven-year deal that guarantees at least 10 tests and 28 one-dayers between New Zealand and Australia to convince the former’s cricket board about the desirability of the proposal.

What’s more, players from neither team are convinced about the prospect of playing test cricket under lights. There have already been plenty of quibbles over the pink ball. The Australian fast bowler Mitchell Starc, who played in a Sheffield Shield day-night trial match, says the pink ball “doesn’t react anything like the red ball, in terms of swing.” It also, according to him, goes soft pretty quickly. “I didn’t see a huge amount of reverse swing in that game,” he said, “and I don’t think it swung from memory too much until the artificial light took over.” Kiwi seamer Trent Boult has similar concerns. “You’re not sure if [the pink ball] swings or if it seams,” he said. “I can’t really see a pink ball shining up too well, as well. There are just too many unknowns, from my point of view.”

To organise play under lights would be tantamount to nothing more than an unwarranted jazzing up of the format; it would only add a perceived allure that test cricket certainly doesn’t need. As Samir Chopra pointed out in his excellent book, Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket , it’s important that administrators look to preserve test cricket for its own sake, “not just as a means to the end of the more profitable television deal.”

Test cricket has to be seen in terms that transcend the purely commercial. It has to be seen as worthy of conservation, as a pursuit whose appeal lies in its customs, its practices, and its structure. The purpose of test cricket is not entertainment. If we were to view it as nothing more than amusement and fun, then we’d be wreaking precisely the kind of damage that those bringing in the day-night matches claim to be saving us from: the death of cricket at its finest.

Suhrith Parthasarathy is a Chennai-based lawyer, writer; @suhrith

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