Cricket’s absurd championship climax perfect for brilliantly silly Test game

Nine in the morning, and Oval station is heaving. People are spilling out of trains and pressing along the narrow platforms, shuffling up and out towards the street. The announcer takes a break from repeating his plea for everyone to “please be patient on the escalators”, and mutters “four more days of this” underneath his breath. “Five” a passer-by tells him with a smile, “if we lose a day for rain”. The platform man rolls his eyes. But they’re a happy crowd, bound by anticipation, and buoyed by the knowledge that the forecast is good, and there is a full day ahead.

“I remember when they first introduced the Test championship we weren’t really sure what relevance it would have,” Mitchell Starc said in the days before this game started. Almost everyone in the sport felt that way.

That first World Test Championship final, played at the Rose Bowl back in the middle of the pandemic, seems, now, like a half-forgotten fragment of some weird fever dream. Six soggy days of intermittent play in front of 4,000 people at a business hotel by a retail park five miles outside Southampton, in which New Zealand, who have since been trounced by England, India, and Bangladesh, somehow ended up proving themselves the best team in the world and a lot of clever-clever journalists wrote long articles about how they had cracked Test cricket.

For Starc, just watching that match was enough to make him want to play in one himself. “When we missed out on the first one, it was like, well, there we go, we want to be there, right?” Australia would have made it that year if they hadn’t been docked four points for a slow over rate in a Test against India. The fact there was a title to win, and that, of all teams, New Zealand had won it instead of