Cricket: Why a draw is often the sign of real cricket

Something out of the ordinary happened yesterday: the England cricket team won a series. It's the second time in 13 attempts since India were last here. There ought to be jubilation throughout the land, with a hit record to follow ("It's coming home, it's coming, crick-et's coming home, it's coming..."). But how do we feel this morning? As flat as a Trent Bridge track.

England 1, India 0, is only one of several ways in which the result can be expressed. Cricket 0, Football 3 is another. A third would be Groundsmen and Umpires 3, Players 0.

None of the pitches was up to standard. The first was a three-day pitch, which only lasted beyond Saturday night through the genius of Sachin Tendulkar. Lord's was a seven-day pitch, and then Nottinghamshire's new ground- sman, Frank Darling, went one better although, to be fair, a result might have been just about possible if both sides had held their catches, if KT Francis had been willing to give more than one LBW, and if the otherwise excellent Javagal Srinath had pitched the ball up enough to catch the edge. It is no coincidence that he, like Mike Hendrick, has never translated his control and movement into a single Test-match five-for.

Nonetheless, what counts is what actually happened. The Lord's Test died on the second day, when Jack Russell and Chris Lewis, enterprising at other times, were jointly becalmed. Just because it flickered back to life for an hour on the last day doesn't make it a decent contest.

This match has been even worse. Neither came close to reaching the fourth innings. Both, in the immortal words of David Bowie, were a saddening bore.

England have now drawn eight of their last 10 Tests. This is a slightly bogus statistic, because they did not draw any of the previous six. But it's not a trend you would want to see continued. Of the three Tests against Pakistan, the first is at Lord's, only a month after the last one, and another is at the Oval, where last year's pitch was a raging turn-off (England 454 and 223 for four; West Indies 692-8dec). Headingley alone promises a result.

England's winter tour is to be spent half in New Zealand, where the pitches are slow and low, and half in Zimbabwe, where they are slower and lower.

England is the only country where Test-match attendances are in good health. At this rate, they won't be for much longer. Crowds like to see wickets. Low-scoring matches are always gripping; high-scoring ones are often dull.

For the purist, a draw is often a sign of real cricket. Certainly the ability to fight for a draw is an important cricket skill. To encourage this once-great British quality, the Test and County Cricket Board changed the rules of the County Champion-ship this year to give three points for a draw.

The upshot is that there have already been 31 draws this summer, compared to 29 in the whole of last season. Whether this is an improvement is another matter. It doesn't seem quite the way to get the crowds flocking into Sophia Gardens, Cardiff, or Grace Road, Leicester.

The International Cricket Council is now meeting at Lord's to elect a new chairman, providing it can first agree on the rules of election. The favourite, the Indian Jagmohan Dalmiya, has revealed himself in the past few days as a reformer and a visionary. This should guarantee that he doesn't get the job: nothing frightens cricket administrators so much as a bit of vision. But his ideas are worth discussing.

Dalmiya wants to make cricket a truly global sport, and thinks this won't happen if so many Tests continue to be drawn. So he wants to find a way of cutting out draws. He mentions having an over limit, or time limit, on the first innings - say 120 overs.

This is the wrong means to the right end. Now that one-day cricket dominates the international scene, the definition of Test cricket is the form of the game in which overs are not limited. The two games complement each other very well. The last thing they need is to become more alike - except in one respect: there ought to be more results in Tests.

There are two better ways for Mr Dalmiya to achieve his aim. First, groundsmen could be required to report not to the home side but to the referee, whose instructions would be to prepare a pitch with some life in it. The danger would be that the whole world would go the way of Edgbaston, and too many fingers would get broken: but that problem could be solved by making it impossible to be caught off the glove, which in turn would encourage the players to wear thicker padding on their fingers.

If that sounds too complicated, try this. When a Test ends in a draw, the referee will have the power to award half a victory to the side that came closer to winning. At Lord's it would clearly have been India.

At Trent Bridge - well, that's a tough one, but difficult decisions are what refereeing is all about, and as things stand cricket's refs have an easy life. The change would ensure that there was something to play for right up to 6pm on Monday (or Tuesday). It works in boxing; and it couldn't have made a series like this one any worse.

Tim de Lisle is editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly.