I watched India’s cricketers collect another Asian Games gold with the uncomplicated pleasure any supporter feels when the flag rises. Then the old unease returned. Cricket did not need rescuing by the Asian Games; Indian cricket certainly did not need another short-format assignment squeezed into an already swollen calendar. Test cricket, meanwhile, continues to be praised at ceremonies and rationed in practice.
The temptation is to call this harmless. The Asian Games matter, the players wanted to represent India, and cricket’s Olympic future gives these tournaments strategic weight. All true. Yet calendars reveal priorities more honestly than speeches. When administrators find space for a commercially or institutionally attractive T20 event but treat an additional Test as an impossible burden, I know which format occupies the family photograph and which one controls the bank account.
A medal is not a development plan
India finished the Aichi-Nagoya Games with a broad medal haul across numerous sports, according to the Indian Olympic Association’s summary. Cricket’s gold will predictably attract disproportionate attention. That is not the cricketers’ fault. They performed the task set before them. My objection is to the idea that placing established stars inside a multi-sport event automatically advances cricket.
Olympic and Asian Games participation can expand the sport in countries where it lacks a professional structure. For India, however, the marginal benefit of another elite T20 medal is small. Cricket already owns attention, sponsorship, broadcast space and political access. The BCCI should use this new global platform to support expansion while protecting the format whose survival cannot be left to market momentum.
That means ring-fencing Test windows, improving domestic preparation and resisting the assumption that every available fortnight should become a franchise property or bilateral T20 series. The BCCI possesses financial leverage no earlier Indian board could imagine. If any institution can subsidise patience, it is this one.
Tests are being asked to justify themselves incorrectly
Administrators increasingly discuss Test cricket as a product that has failed to maximise daily engagement. That is like criticising a novel because it does not behave like a notification. A Test’s value lies in accumulated pressure: the spell that changes a batter’s footwork, the old ball that finally reverses, the pitch that becomes a different surface on the fourth afternoon. The format asks the audience to remember. Its slowness is not dead time; it is the mechanism.
I am not romantic enough to ignore empty seats or financial imbalance. Many boards cannot stage long series without assistance. India should therefore champion a stronger central mechanism that supports less wealthy Test nations. It should also schedule home Tests with spectators in mind: sensible start times, affordable multi-day passes, shade, drinking water, reliable entry and venues chosen for demand rather than administrative rotation alone.
BCCI’s public fixtures and tournament announcements, available through its official site, show how much cricket India must organise. Congestion is real, but congestion is designed. Nobody discovers a league accidentally. Windows are negotiated, bilateral series are shortened and players are moved across formats because administrators decide which commitments are untouchable.
The workload argument cuts selectively
Player welfare is often invoked to justify rest from Tests. I support rest. Fast bowlers are not industrial parts, and India has too often celebrated their bravery while consuming their bodies. But workload management becomes unconvincing when the same player is rested from a red-ball match and then appears in a sequence of high-intensity T20 contests involving travel, promotional obligations and minimal recovery.
The answer is not to ban players from earning. It is to create transparent format priorities and larger specialist pools. A bowler central to India’s Test plans should receive compensation and contractual protection that make skipping some franchise cricket a rational decision rather than a patriotic financial sacrifice. Test specialists should not feel like employees in a department scheduled for closure.
Selection must also reward domestic red-ball performance. The Ranji Trophy cannot be treated as a waiting room through which a fashionable white-ball player strolls briefly before receiving a Test cap. Technique, temperament and repeated performance over long innings still matter. If selectors communicate that clearly, young players will train accordingly. If selection follows visibility, they will chase visibility.
What the Asian Games could teach us
There is a useful lesson in the multi-sport environment. Athletes in shooting, rowing, athletics and archery build four-year plans around tiny margins. Their federations are rightly criticised when preparation is chaotic. Cricket, cushioned by wealth, should be held to at least the same standard. Its Test programme needs a multi-year strategy, not nostalgic promotional videos before marquee series.
I would begin with a published commitment to a minimum number of Tests over a rolling cycle, including meaningful series against more than three commercially attractive opponents. I would protect preparation matches where conditions demand them. I would fund India A tours properly, preserve high-quality domestic pitches and publish workload principles so omissions are not explained by whispers.
The counterargument is obvious: audiences choose T20, and administrators must follow them. But large institutions also shape choice. Broadcasters cannot build anticipation for matches announced late or placed awkwardly. Children cannot attend Tests if grounds are inhospitable and school-day access is ignored. Fans cannot form memories around a format they rarely see in their region. Demand is not a weather system. It responds to care.
Cricket can afford more than inevitability
Other countries face brutal economics. India faces a question of will. The BCCI can make money from short-form cricket and still act as steward of Tests. It can celebrate an Asian Games gold and still admit that international T20 medals should not consume every available player or window. It can support cricket’s Olympic expansion without allowing the five-day game to become an elite bilateral boutique.
I am not asking the board to recreate my childhood. The old game contained plenty worth discarding: dead pitches, defensive over rates, inaccessible broadcasts and administrators who mistook scarcity for grandeur. Modern Tests can be better marketed, more fairly distributed and more aggressively played. What they cannot be is infinitely compressed.
The Asian Games medal will enter the record book. Good. The deeper measure of Indian cricket’s health will be whether a talented fourteen-year-old fast bowler believes the highest ambition is to win a Test overseas, and whether the system gives him the preparation, money and calendar to pursue it.
I still believe a final-session Test chase can produce a tension no ten-over finish replicates, because it carries four days of choices inside it. BCCI executives often say something similar. I would like them to place that conviction on a calendar. Affection without allocation is merely branding.
