Stop moaning about draws – they’re part of the majesty of Test cricket

For all the damnation and disappointment sparked by the inevitability of the result, there was something fitting about last week’s first Test between Pakistan and Australia ending in a draw. This, after all, is the spiritual home of stalemate: though only 32% of the 2,345 Tests in history have been drawn, in the first half-century of Test cricket in Pakistan 51% of all matches ended without a winner (65 of 128).

Between October 1961 and March 1984 England played out 11 successive draws there, including three of the five all-drawn series Pakistan hosted in that time. Fully 69% of all Tests played in Pakistan in the 1960s were drawn, followed by 71% in the 1970s and 56% in the 1980s. Returning to the country for the first time in 24 years Australia picked up where they had left off, with a seventh draw in their last nine matches there going back to 1988.

Steve Smith bemoaned a “benign, dead wicket”; Wasim Akram thought the pitch guaranteed cricket that “is quite boring, to be honest” and that “as an ex-fast bowler I knew this would be a draw after the second delivery”. “A drawn match is never a good advertisement for Test cricket,” said Ramiz Raja, the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board. Meanwhile in Antigua, the first Test between West Indies and England headed along a different path towards the same destination.

The former Observer cricket correspondent RC Robertson-Glasgow – who for much of his life laboured under the nickname Crusoe after someone confused his name with that of Daniel Defoe’s castaway – once complained that “drawn matches are the threat and ruin of modern Tests: boring to anticipate, irritating in process, and unsatisfactory in retrospect”, and 84 years and several redefinitions of the word modern