It is surely the ultimate challenge in international cricket: winning a Test series in India. It’s the pinnacle for a Test team, much harder than in Australia. India have lost only one home series in 19 years, in 2012, when Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar spun Alastair Cook’s England to an epic victory. The latest instalment of this marquee series is almost upon us, and will be a chance to see whether Ben Stokes, Brendon McCullum and their Bazballers can deliver when the odds look stacked against them.

Or is it going to be one of the last rituals before Test cricket becomes a quirky occasional outing for a handful of countries? The recent two-match series between South Africa and India seemed to be a weird version of It’s A Knockout, and featured the shortest Test match ever played.

Steve Waugh has been delivering apocalyptic warnings about the future of
Test cricket 

England will be going into this series with three rookie spinners and no Stuart Broad, and won’t be playing a single warm-up game, which you may regard as something of a mistake. Steve Harmison, the former England fast bowler and now a most acute commentator, certainly does: he said England ‘deserve to get beat 5-0’ because they plan to arrive in India just a few days before the first Test starts in a couple of weeks in Hyderabad – though they will have had ten days in the warmth of Abu Dhabi for a bit of practice and, of course, lots of golf.

Steve Waugh, the former Aussie skipper and the most successful captain in Test history, has been delivering some apocalyptic warnings about the future of Test cricket. ‘History and tradition must count for something,’ he said. ‘If we stand by and allow profits to be the defining criteria, the legacy of Bradman, Grace and Sobers will be irrelevant.’ You would have to be a brave man or an idiot to disagree.

Typically, UK TV rights for the series are still unsold. Channel 4 often ghosts in at the last minute – it scooped up the 2020 series in India in a £7 million deal agreed three days before the first Test. That’s unlikely this time, as it is laying off hundreds of staff. So currently Disney+ is the favourite to screen the series in the UK, though it isn’t many people’s idea of a cricket channel. Presumably it has its eye on the 2028 Olympics in LA, where cricket will feature heavily. About one thing we can be pretty clear: the BBC won’t lift a finger to try to buy the rights.

The Indian money men know they have to get the best possible deal for broadcasting rights, because they sure as hell won’t be making much on the gate or on beer sales. Indian crowds now just flock to T20, though I guess if Virat Kohli was 80 not out at tea, a few thousand would head straight for the ground.

Still they do things differently in India. A friend was reporting an India-England game at Eden Gardens, Calcutta, in the 1970s and took his report to the telex operator despatching copy from under the stands. The operator was unaware of the need for urgency, or chose to be. After some moments of inaction, my friend snapped, ‘That copy has to be in London in five minutes.’ The telex man turned to him with a pitying look and said, ‘What is five minutes against eternity?’ My friend laughed but the Sun man behind said, ‘Tell him to get in there in five minutes or he’ll know all about eternity.’

Franz Beckenbauer and J.P.R. Williams, gone on the same day and both before their time. They were both defenders, who are seldom lionised, though they each also liked to attack. The Kaiser did so with supreme class, while J.P.R. took a kamikaze approach to personal safety – so much so that he was once banned from training on a Lions tour because he kept on injuring his own teammates. There is something heartbreaking about great old sports heroes passing – maybe because unlike, say, rock stars, they remain young and brilliant, frozen on the field of dreams in our head./>