Last month saw the 150th men’s Test match to be held at ‘the home of cricket’, Lord’s Cricket Ground, in London. Yet, rather than a moment of celebration, the pre-match commentary, as England prepared to play New Zealand, was predictably downcast about the future of this hallowed but now endangered form of the best-loved game.
The long shadow of the recently-completed Indian Premier League and T20 cricket’s global expansion loomed threateningly over St. John’s Wood. England’s star bowler, Jofra Archer, was absent with leave, resting from his lucrative exertions in India. England’s most promising young batter, Jacob Bethell, was nursing a finger injury picked up a few weeks before in Dharamshala playing for Royal Challengers Bengaluru. The newspapers glumly predicted rain and empty seats at Lord’s, and that the Test series would struggle to compete for attention with the football World Cup.
As it does for every Lord’s Test, a queue of members of the Marylebone Cricket Club formed along the St. John’s Wood Road hours before the opening of the Grace Gates. But the pervasive Test-match-pessimism had infected even the early birds of MCC. While the day dawned, as Tennyson put it, “ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain”, memories of England’s wasteful batting in the Ashes during the winter were as fresh and depressing as the low clouds. One venerable member, aged 89, who had travelled down by train from Lancashire, worried aloud that Test matches might not long outlive him.
The cricket for much of that first day seemed to mirror the surrounding gloom. Overcast skies compounded the difficulty of batting on an up-and-down pitch, which Jonathan Agnew, the broadcaster, said looked like a balding scalp after a bad hair implant. Put into bat after losing the toss, England collapsed to a slovenly 140 all-out from 39.4 overs, their demise leavened only by intermittent showers. That epitome of wayward youth, Harry Brook, dropped twice, somehow biffed his way inelegantly to a highest score of 56. England’s batters had discarded their reckless abandon of the winter, but to no good effect.
Test matches, however, as Tim Wigmore’s excellent recent history of Test cricket rightly stresses, are games of second chances. A first-innings collapse always cries out to be redeemed by excellent bowling and an improved showing in the second innings. And so, on the first evening session of the 150th Lord’s Test, England began to poke its head, phoenix-like, out of the ashes.
The prodigal fast-medium seamer, Ollie Robinson, playing his first match in two years, bounded in from the Nursery End like a greyhound shocked to be let off his leash, snapping up three wickets in his first over. Surprising as sunshine breaking through the clouds, the crowd’s spirits and noise level suddenly lifted. By the long day’s rain-delayed ending at 7.30 pm, New Zealand were 61 for 6, Robinson had taken 4 for 10, the crowd were boisterously chanting his name, and Test cricket had, once again, by its trademark alchemy, turned rainwater into sparkling wine.
The game kept fizzing along on the brighter second-day, New Zealand’s batsmen rendered punch-drunk by lifters and shooters from an increasingly fickle strip. In the circumstances, England’s second innings of 226 all out from 56 overs for a lead of 254 felt like a king’s ransom. A brave, technically upright innings of 57 from the debutant opener, Emilio Gay, showed the influence of the patient, orderly style of Sir Alastair Cook. But the pitch could not be tamed for long, even by Gay’s long stride forward. Only a washed-out Saturday extended this roller-coaster match into a fourth day. New Zealand, after a delusive hint of resistance, trailed off sadly to defeat by 115 runs before lunch on Sunday.
The 150th men’s Lord’s Test was no classic. On the contrary, it exposed many of the quirks and foibles of a format that so often promises to deceive. The pitch was poor. The weather was dreary and wet. The cricket stuttered along, mostly forgettably. The future of this apparently geriatric Victorian legacy seemed bleak. Then, as if to hammer home the point, England’s former captain and talisman, Ben Stokes — he retired after the third Test — notably fuming after being bowled for nought in the second innings, let off steam by breaking his team’s midnight curfew and
was forcibly stepped down for the second Test.
And yet, for generations of cricket-lovers around the world, Test cricket’s many ups and downs have always been an essential part of its fragile beauty. Test matches, as the name implies, are nothing if not testing. They test the patience and imagination of the audience as much as the skill and endurance of the players. They have lasted this long in part because humans like to find ways to test themselves, and to watch others prove themselves in the most testing of circumstances. As a pure test of cricketing mettle, the Test match remains the time-tested world leader, unlikely ever to be surpassed.
In an age when T20 franchises dominate cricket’s revenue streams, it is easy to forget that Test matches were themselves invented as money-making ventures by canny Victorian entrepreneurs seeking to profit from overseas tours in an age of rapid globalisation. In those early days, Test cricket was a White supremacist imperial club, monopolised by England, Australia and South Africa. But in the inter-war years, as the declining British Empire belatedly embraced nation-building as a last-ditch survival strategy, playing Test matches became a marker of national progress for emergent post-colonial nations. As Prashant Kidambi argued in his fine book on early Indian cricket, becoming a “cricket country” was an important stepping stone to becoming an independent country.
In retrospect, we can see the 1980s as the culmination of this imperial and anti-imperial history of Test cricket. Test matches thrived in a postcolonial commonwealth of nations, with Clive Lloyd’s West Indies in the all-conquering vanguard, and England down among the also-rans, their coach reduced by 1996 to yelling “we flippin’ murdered ‘em” after drawing with Zimbabwe.
Then, in a new world order of satellite TV and cell phones, Test cricket rapidly lost its global empire, and is still searching for a role. T20 schedules spread like wildfire, and a new supremacism of the monied wilfully widened the gap between Test cricketing haves and have-nots. The feeling now grows that the game of second chances is running out of options.
I once heard my teacher, the great historian of India, Sir C.A. Bayly, say that historians tended to underestimate the role of self-respect in history. I take this wise provocation as a source of hope for the future, not least for the future of the Test match. The history of Test match cricket is, after all, a story of the quest for individual and national self-respect among cricketing peoples, striving for excellence in the most challenging form of the game, a history that is still vital and ongoing.
Indeed, Test match cricket may only now be entering its much-too-long-delayed second innings. From July 10, 2026, England and India will play the first, yes the very first, women’s Test match at Lord’s, which will also be the 150th women’s Test match anywhere in the world. This is a moment, therefore, not for nostalgia or dismay, but for celebrating the still youthful history of Test matches, both men’s and women’s, and for looking forward to the 150th women’s Test match at Lord’s somewhere around 2168.
Robert Travers is a cricket-lover and Professor of History at Cornell University