Test Cricket: Tim Wigmore's masterly history of the game and empire

A sweeping review of Tim Wigmore's Test Cricket: A History, exploring how empire, race, class and politics shaped the game's longest format

Test Cricket: A History

By Tim Wigmore

Published by Quercus

592 pages  ₹899

 

In its long silences, its seemingly unhurried rhythms, the game of cricket hides histories. Why have most black players in the South African team been pacers and most whites batsmen? Why is cricket more vulnerable to fixing than football? How did neutral umpires reshape the demography of left-handed batters? How did a US immigration delay shape one of the West Indies’ greatest careers? These are not questions one may expect from a sport. But then, cricket has never been merely a sport. 

“What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” C L R James asked in his immortal Beyond a Boundary. A plain beach looks unremarkable until you know what’s buried beneath: Centuries of sediment, of life, of accumulation. Cricket is that beach. It carries histories within histories, shaping and being shaped by the world around it. 

The history of colonialism is hard to separate from the history of cricket. They were born, in many ways, together, one carrying the other across oceans and empires. Tim Wigmore’s Test Cricket: A History begins there. “Cricket was, in part, a ‘conduit for Westernisation,’ (...) intimately connected with social and racial elitism,” he writes. His scope — men’s Test cricket — is clear from the outset, and within that boundary, he takes the reader through the full sweep of the sport’s many lives. 

Test cricket has always been haunted by its own obituary. The format is, by any commercial logic, absurd: Five days with no guaranteed result, a pace that demands patience most modern entertainment has trained us against. Wigmore quotes Lynton Taylor, a Channel Nine executive, all the way back in 1978, “I do not know that Test cricket can be saved. I hope so but I am not convinced. People will no longer sit through five days of a match.” 

And yet the game perseveres. It “has endured because, like the best novels and films, its qualities are discovered by every new generation afresh.” The format gives nothing away easily. It accumulates, pressurises, exposes. “Test cricket’s format is the enemy of romance (...) A weaker team might thrive over one, two or even three innings of  a match, yet gravity will probably get them in the end.” 

Wigmore’s tome stays true to that C L R James line — to understand cricket, it sets about understanding the world that created it. This is not only a history of cricket, but also a history of colonialism, race, class, caste, capitalism, terrorism, geography, innovation, and the particular psychologies that war and empire produce. “In the 172 Test matches played until 1928, just three cricketers were not white.” This uncomfortable relationship between the sport and power would continue, shifting and adapting, well into the apartheid era and beyond. 

That history has shaped, and continues to shape, the country’s cricket. “Where bowling depends relatively more on nature — a player’s physical gifts — batting depends more on nurture: The equipment, coaching, facilities and practice time available to children. The dearth of black batters, then, has reflected the wider socio-economic environment in South Africa.” What looks like a question of talent is, underneath, a question of access, which is to say, a question of history. 

“The salience of class in determining who led sides was intertwined with a preference for batters to be captain. From cricket’s earliest days, when landowners enlisted labourers to bowl to them, batting was seen as more glamorous than bowling.” The insistence on the captain being either white (in the West Indies) or elite class/caste (in India and England) often meant that teams would fight it out with a relatively weaker side. 

The breadth and ambition of the book are such that they surpass even the grandeur of its subject matter. Threading it all together is seamless prose, much like a cover drive struck from the middle of the bat — elegant, a thing of beauty. “If much of Test cricket was monochrome, Sobers played in glorious Technicolor. Most cricketers of the age were one-dimensional, or two-dimensional at best. Sobers had five dimensions.” 

Elsewhere, he writes, “[Don] Bradman remains for ever the gold, unattainable standard in Test cricket — a byword for perfection in a maddening game (...) When Bradman died, aged 92, it was the first time that he had been dismissed in the 90s.” Describing Adam Gilchrist, he notes how he was “the catalyst for changing how wicketkeepers batted. The history of Test keepers is the story of BG (Before Gilchrist) and AG (After Gilchrist).” 

On a chapter depicting South African dominance in the 2000s and 2010s, he notes, “Lithe, with an explosive run-up that generated dazzling pace, eyes that bulged, a penchant for staring at batters and a primal scream when he got them out, to see [Dale] Steyn was to see the essence of pace bowling.” 

The research — across decades and continents — is staggering, but what sustains it is a genuine devotion to the subject. Wigmore loves this game. It shows in the care with which he handles its contradictions — its beauty and its ugliness, its poetry and its politics. 

It may be a book of the longest format in sports. But like Test cricket itself, it earns everything it asks of you: The patience, the attention. Like a reverse-swinging yorker, a stumping completed before the eye can follow, a century raised at dusk, a perfectly timed cover drive, a tail-ender’s stubborn last-wicket stand, Wigmore’s Test Cricket is a thing of beauty — as layered, and as alive, as the game itself. A masterpiece, in the truest sense of the word. 

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The reviewer is a journalist, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world. Instagram/X: aroomofwords