As Tests go...

I know that I said I never watched Cricket Tests. It was true up until a month ago. But with the Australians recently touring India for the Border-Gavaskar trophy, which consists of four Tests, I seem to have taken a sudden liking to Tests. Somehow the thought that a Test equates to a battle is a charming thought. Unlike the Twenty20 or ODI formats in Cricket, a Test is played for a period of five days. That's right! Five days! Each team gets to play two innings, each attempting to better its scores, or simply keeping the other down, with every batting turn. At the end of a day of play, the teams get to assess a variety of factors:

• How did the pitch behave today? Was there enough turn on the ball? Was there enough swing for the pace bowlers?
• Who played well and who didn't? Is a player's exising injury starting to bother him and should that be taken into consideration going forward?
• How much of the weather was a factor today? How much of the weather will be a factor during the remaining days? If the weather makes a turn for the worse (maybe heavy crosswinds are predicted), will the behavior of the pitch change?
• If that particular batsman turns out to be in great form tomorrow, how should the fielding placings be to counter his favorite selection of shots?
• And so on...

So now you see why such a Cricket match is called a Test! Trust me. People call Cricket a slow, boring game. But that is because they don't understand it or don't care to. In the Border-Gavaskar trophy, there are four Tests involved. This is a series. Whichever team wins the most Tests takes the series. The series is played every few years in India. And it is always played between India and Australia. The Aussies are the number 1 ranked Test team in the world. India are in 3rd place (South Africa are in 2nd place).

So far in the 2008 series, 2 Tests have been played in this series. The first Test was drawn and India won the 2nd Test by a huge margin. The 3rd Test will be on a ground where the India team has not lost the last 7 Tests it played there. And the Aussies apparently, after their heavy defeat last week, are raring to go! Anyway, the 3rd Test begins tonight at 12 PM EST (9 AM local time) in Delhi. An additional problem the teams have to encounter at the beginning of this 3rd Test is low visibility because of smog from all the firecrackers that were used up for the recently concluded Diwali, a national festival! I am going to bed now to get a few hours of sleep because I have to be up at midnight!!