Daily Mail: Shameful that TV chiefs have left us facing Test blackout

Story from Daily Mail:

You really do wonder what more Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum must do in their drive to reinvigorate and revive Test cricket.

On the back of last summer’s iridescent Ashes, ticket sales for this summer’s home Tests are strong, even though the opposition — West Indies and Sri Lanka — are not usually such a huge draw.

But 14 days out from the series in India, which sees Bazball put to the test in arguably the world’s most challenging terrain, we are today left hoping that a left-field bidder, perhaps Disney+, will step in to prevent a UK blackout.

The series will be broadcast live on radio through talkSPORT but prospects of a terrestrial broadcaster delivering pictures at the last minute, as Channel 4 did three years ago when India’s infamously avaricious BCCI bargained the UK broadcasters off the table, seem extremely unlikely.

Channel 4 is focused on this summer’s Paralympics. The noises around the BBC also suggest next to no chance.

It would be an extreme surprise to Sky’s commentary team if they find themselves asked to head out at the last minute. TNT Sports, formerly BT Sport, have ruled nothing out but their involvement is also said to be ‘highly unlikely’. Neither Sky nor TNT have engaged in the rights sales.

And even if a last-minute deal is, as some expect, concluded today, prepare for the dismal prospect of a broadcaster taking the world feed from India. That will lumber us with partisan commentators Sunil Gavaskar and Sanjay Manjrekar. It will be Test cricket, but not as we would like to know it.

It would be a disgrace if there is no 11th-hour rescue here. The impasse stems in part from our broadcasters spreading budgets very thinly, so let’s not hear Sky’s Test team analysing the struggles and decline of Test cricket any time soon if their paymasters cannot see the need to invest for the future when needed.

Sky benefited immensely from the wonders of Stokes, Jonny Bairstow, Joe Root and Co last summer. So now is the time to put something back in. To accept that it is not as easy drawing audiences at 4am UK time, when England’s record in India has been dispiriting and Rohit Sharma’s men have been extremely dominant at home.

England have won one series there since 1984-85 and Nasser Hussain points out that turning pitches are not the only issue for Stokes’s players. The India seam attack is more than decent, too. But if Sky, who have done so much for Test cricket, can’t invest against the odds, then what does that say about their belief in the long form of the game?

This struggle is testament to the sad fact that bilateral cricket is no longer the be-all and end-all. The evidence of that has been all around this past four weeks.

David Warner has called time on his career midway through Australia’s Test summer, yet will play in the International League T20 in the UAE. South Africa’s Heinrich Klaasen has retired from the format, aged 32. Former West Indies captain Jason Holder has passed up a central contract. South Africa have named a second-string squad to tour New Zealand because of a clash with the SA20. What a desperate month for men’s Test cricket.

Yet with Stokes and McCullum at the helm, there is hope. Some of England’s players have more experience of playing in India than previous generations because of the IPL. England will have remembered the mistake they made playing four seamers at Ahmedabad in the day-night Test last time out, when the ball turned square.

The Ashes were something special last summer but the weeks ahead would top that if England can go toe-to-toe with Sharma’s men. Hussain observed in The Cricketer last month that ‘winning a Test series in India is one of the two greatest challenges for the modern player, along with Australia away’. Surely a broadcaster will take a punt on that prospect. It will be a dark day for the game if none does.