It has been 12 years since cricket witnessed a five-Test series that was not the Ashes.
In early 2009 England played five Tests in the West Indies, but that was originally scheduled to be a four-Test series and was increased only after one Test was abandoned.
On Thursday, England and India meet at Nottingham in the first Test of a five-Test series. For India, this will be their first five-Test series since a trip to the Caribbean in 2002.
It will be a very modern five-Test series, squeezed into under a month and a half. That is an absurdly short amount of time.
To look at it in perspective, the Indian Premier League lasts nearly two and a half months, while the football World Cup is done and dusted in just over a month.
Cricket has come to the conclusion that a five-Test series is a measure of the health of Test cricket and, stretching that, the health of a member country.
It has become a luxury good, affordable to only the super-elite of the game, which, as it stands, is made up of India and the two Ashes contestants.
Outside that big three, the West Indies have not had a scheduled five-Test series since 2002, South Africa not since 2004/05 and Pakistan not since 1992.
Then it gets worse. New Zealand have not been in a five-Test series since 1971/72. Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe have never played in one.
None of these members is Test-cricket-lucrative enough to be subsidised and stretched out over that many Tests. More importantly, neither is there the inclination in most of these members to develop their markets to be robust enough to hold a five-Test series.
In that light, this series is important. India and England have agreed to play each other only in five-Test series during the next eight years. Incentive and opportunity may come for the others from the soon-to-be created Test Cricket Fund but, until then, five Tests between India, England and Australia will have to do.
On its own, a five-Test series need not say much about the standards of the countries that play it.
A look over the debris of recent four or five-Test series reveals that England have been clean-swept twice in the Australian Ashes since 2006; Australia lost 3-0 in England in 2013; India lost eight out of eight in successive four-Test series in England and Australia; and Australia lost four out of four in India last year.
It is fine in principle to want to play a five-Test series, but if India are blown away, as they were in 2011, then how much is that really helping Test cricket?
Once a team begins to lose Tests early, the series starts to drag.
Australia and Mitchell Johnson were unfailingly compelling in the Ashes earlier this year, but after the third Test, and especially during the last, all semblance of contest had been so drained that it had become unwatchable.
What fate does this series between two mid-table sides hold?
With a little caution it could be said this should be closer, even if much has happened to both since their last encounter, when England so spiritedly overcame India in India. Neither side is in a good enough place at the moment to inflict anything like a whitewash on the other, although, to be fair, none of the one-sided results recently were predicted beforehand.
England have just been beaten by Sri Lanka at home, a result that confirms the alarming nature of their decline in this past year. India, meanwhile, went to New Zealand and lost a series.
England’s captain is under intense pressure and the scrutiny will only increase the longer he fails, or his side fails, to win. India’s leader is permanently under that kind of burden, though another overseas series loss, and a thumping one, could be seminal. Four or five-zero will play a lot worse than 1-0 or 2-0.
Much of the worry besides will be about lasting the distance.
MS Dhoni and India generally are some of the game’s most-overworked cricketers and this summer is a truly challenging schedule. England are not far behind and already there are concerns about whether their front-line pacemen, Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad, can handle a third five-Test series within a year.
Given that the series is being played without the Decision Review System (DRS), let us not forget the umpires. Some of them will be used to standing in the Ashes, but the DRS is employed in those.
Without it, the kind of scrutiny they will come under during five Tests will be immense. A condensed schedule it may be, but this could start to feel like a really long summer soon enough.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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