I can still hear the noise. It is one of those intense memories that have stayed with me. I was taken to see a cricket match at the Eden Gardens for the first time. In front of me was a lush green oval carpet. There were players in spotless white. The stands were filled with people. Then came the roar. A red ball was rushing towards the fence. Everybody stood up and was applauding.

Later in the day, India was fielding. As the bowler started his run-up, there was this rhythmic chant, “Baba Taraknather charane sheba lage”. The rhythm matched the run-up of the bowler. And then as the ball left the hand of the bowler, the stands erupted with the last part of the chant , “Mahadev”.

This roar in a Test match ground has stopped. Attendance in Sri Lanka was bad enough but the recent series win against the Aussies ( PTI picture above) had very few witnesses on the ground. The problem is that the authorities cannot discard the original form of the game. Purists love it. Cricketers agree that it is the true test of their cricketing skill. The tradition is too strong to withdraw the original product and just concentrate on the money-spinning variants. So Mr Pawar and Mr Dalmiya, Mr Manohar and Mr Modi, have to make the most of a bad business. They have to bring the crowd back.

Everybody agrees that Test Cricket needs to be repositioned. The focus in this effort is on the structure of the game. Possibilities like limiting each innings to 100 overs are being debated. The idea of a World Test Championship is being mooted so that sentiments could be provoked. The real solution could, however, lie somewhere else.

In the heyday of Test Cricket, going to see the match was a welcome ritual in the mild winter of Calcutta. The block reserved for annual member of the Cricket Association of Bengal was next to the sight screen on the Maidan end. There was no Club House those days. Seats were spacious. Lunch was tasty — usually brought from home and shared with neighbours. Often there would be comments made that everyone in the vicinity could enjoy.

Come to think of it, very little of pure cricket was discussed or even consumed. How could we? Most seats on this block (others were worse) were at third slip or wider. Making out whether a ball is outside the off stump or the leg stump was difficult till one saw the wicketkeeper collect. We would mostly applaud the gross — a boundary or a wicket. Indeed, not many of us had the cricketing acumen to appreciate a defensive stroke on the back foot that made a chest high ball drop docilely at the batsman’s feet. On top of it India seldom won any matches those days. So, to the vast majority of us, cricket was an excuse for a winter picnic in the Maidan.

These days the refrain is: Test Cricket is boring. So has it been always. People still went to the ground. Sure, cricket was the reason for their visit, but the subtlety of cricket was rarely the hook. The real enjoyment came from the noise, from the fellow spectators, from the packed lunches and from the faulty announcements.

Some decades back, the cricket authorities in Bengal — especially its current supremo — felt that such peripheral enjoyment was detrimental to the game of cricket. So Eden Garden was concretised. Annual members were shunted to the other end of the ground. The space given for seating a spectator was brought down to the bare minimum. Toilets were made unusable. Drinking water was impossible to find. Food was expensive and scarce.

All this was done with one objective — make the spectators as uncomfortable as possible so that they have nothing else to concentrate on except the cricket. After all, spectators cannot be allowed to open hampers to eat food when the great Tendulkar is square driving McGrath. The authorities were successful. Most people stopped having fun in Eden Gardens — because they stopped going there.

There is a lesson in all this for those trying to bring them back to watch Test Cricket. The pied piper could well be hiding outside the fence. Do not only look for it inside.