Standing up

This is why Sachin Tendulkars proposal on how to fill up the stands for Test matches is so welcome. Why not,he asks,set apart one stand at a Test match venue for free seats for schoolchildren? Even if 10 per cent of those children are won over to the longer,some would argue purer,version of cricket,its future would be secured. Tendulkars suggestion is similar to the practice in the West Indies of making available unsold seats at matches to schoolchildren.

But the suggestion could be taken forward. At a time when the shortest version of the game has such robust viability,it may be to even T20s benefit to strengthen bonds with Test cricket. Even amongst the gloomiest of crickets pessimists and the most unabashed of T20s enthusiasts not always two perfectly overlapping subsets there is a sense that T20 is sustained by the larger legacy of Test cricket and cricketers before it. Too often the argument is framed in terms of whether Test is threatened by T20. Perhaps if crickets great practitioners like Tendulkar made the case that T20 as cricket would be bereft without the larger context of Tests,the discussion would cease to be so binary.