In Pursuit Of Gold

Cricket’s golden boy, AB de Villiers, has given up Test cricket for the time being. It will give him a chance to earn eye-watering sums of money and win an elusive trophy.

- Nick Said

You would be hard-pressed to find a cricketer who does not see the five-day format as the ultimate test of skill in the game, but despite this status it is also beginning to lose its luster to the high-octane, and high-money stakes, of limited overs cricket.

AB de Villiers’ decision to ditch the longer format, for now, in search of limited overs glory says much about where his priorities lie. He has other career objectives away from Test cricket, which is fair enough, but where players previously did everything possible to play the longest format of the game, that is now palpably no longer the case in many parts of the world.

Challenges to Test cricket are not new; there was a time when One-Day Internationals (ODIs) were thought of as the future of the game, before its smaller cousin, Twenty20 cricket, was born and has now placed the 50-over format under threat.

In our pursuit of cramming more action into a shorter period of time, as attention spans wane and we have ever more entertainment buzzing about to distract us, five days of cricket can seem just too long, for players and fans.

And therein lies the danger for Tests, even as the ‘purest’ form of the game. It is a format that is fighting to hold attention as we are bombarded with more convenient entertainment choices.

And it is not just the fans who feel that way. De Villiers earlier this year became the latest cricketer to put a halt to his Test career in favor of the shorter formats.

Brendon McCullum, Chris Gayle, MS Dhoni, Dwayne Bravo, to name just a few, are other big-name players who quit Tests to concentrate on the shorter format and they continue to feature in lucrative leagues around the world.