Kmflett's Blog

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Monday: Test cricket finished for the summer; Tuesday: The Hundred starts

I’ve been going to Test matches at The Oval for longer than I can remember.

I was there on 27^th August 1968 with my father when Underwood bowled the Australians out on what had been an uncovered pitch after rain.

Later when I worked as a manager for what is now one of the UK’s largest companies at Vauxhall from 1981, I would often wander down at around 11am to catch a day’s Test cricket. Particularly on the final day (then a Tuesday) if an interesting result was in prospect.

I was there again on Thursday 31^st July, for the first day of the final England v India Test. Aside from getting drenched in a hail storm, it was a good time to watch high class cricket. The result on Monday morning was gripping. 56 minutes of intense cricket which saw India triumph, just, and draw the Test series. One of the great sporting spectacles.

Things have changed of course. 30 years ago you could simply wander along to The Oval Test and get in on the gate.

The development of the Ashes into the occasion it is today started to see that change, until the situation today where you apply in a ballot for a ticket for the Oval Test in the autumn of the previous year. Entrance is via a scan of your e-ticket on your mobile

It is not of course the end of the cricketing summer. From Tuesday there are several weeks of the Hundred, which Sky and the BBC are contractually obliged to cover. I may well check some of the women’s games where the standard of cricket is often higher than the men’s games.

The Hundred has its appeal, not least in the £500 million that the ECB has gathered from the franchisees who now have a stake in the Hundred teams. As a sporting occasion and spectacle there is no chance of it matching the Oval Test, however hyperbolic the commentators are.

That feeling of the Oval Test marking the transition from summer to autumn has gone. With its departure has come a five match Test series held to very tight timescales with the result that both sides at the Oval are missing key players who are injured.

We live not just in a market economy but a market society, and the timing of the Oval Test in 2025 is part of that, unfortunately. And as the Hundred starts on Tuesday it is the market not sport that is the key element in play