Traditionalists,
When confronted with something like the Pink Stink, the first obvious question you would ask yourself would be "What would Clarkey do?"
But, Pup appeared to be just as perplexed as anyone on commentary duty on the telly.
If he wasn't getting paid a handsome fee to say that day/night Test match cricket is the best thing since bottled Scotch or a years supply of KFC, as a newly minted Honorary Life Member of the MCC, you'd hope that MJ Clarke would say "Disaster. Tremendous waste of time and money for no purpose. Abandon it ".
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with Test cricket.
There used to be a saying "if it aint broke, don't fix it, and if it is broke, and you can't fix it with fencing wire, then it's not worth fixing".
The Stats Guru is scratching his head also, and while his abacus is having real trouble trying to make sense of the crazy numbers, he ventures to suggest that playing the crucial hour before sunset and the hour after the orb dips below the horizon could just be a matter of developing a new tactical element in a game already chock full of known unknowns.
But for the purist, there is obviously something wrong with the ball, and no amount of fencing wire is going to help.
Apart from the hue of this year's model of the Pinkie looking very gaudy indeed, at first glance it can wildly favour the bowlers in the twilight hours, or, it may not.
So, if you are the Captain, you really can't put a tactical punt on it.
Otherwise how do you explain Pakistan being bowled out cheaply on the evening of Day Two in Brisvegas, and yet comfortably batting their way through the dusk on Day Four to push the game into the hitherto unknown territory of Day Five, on their way to what could have been the biggest winning run chase in the history of the game, only to fall oh so short?
Weird as.
But it's obviously no longer about the game itself; bugger the survival chances of Test cricket.
Doesn't matter how many swimming pools, pool decks, beaches, cocktail bars you put in the ground, or how many punters dressed in stupid costumes come through the turnstiles to be seen and get pissed, it's all about how it rates on the crystal bucket.
And cricket television ratings, it seems, are already going sub-Antarctic anyway, if it's not T20.
With a generation that has the attention span of a gnat, and the way things are headed, the BBL will end up being the only thing Cricket Australia has left to sell, but it's franchised, so they don't even own it properly.
And what was the official attendance on Day Five in Brissy?
A Sheffield Shield crowd -- less than two thousand.
Same as it ever was.
Reports suggest Kookaburra turned out the MkVIII version of the Pinkie for the current summer, and they are already working on MkIX to serve up to the Poms next year.
They must be so utterly frustrated, given that there is nothing at all wrong with the traditional red ball - it's worked for a very very long time, well over a century - and yet they can't, for all they try, get the Pinkie right.
And who was the bright spark who dreamt up the insane idea of putting flashing lights in the bails?
Gawd save me.
Wassup?
To me, the tactics in a day/night Test match seem to hinge almost entirely on whichever side bats first and can produce a batsman who can simply survive a couple of hours of a wildly swinging, curving, spinning, wobbling, bouncing, practically un-playable invisible ball under lights, and then goes on to make a big hundred in the broad light of day, wins.
Simple.
Ipso facto, the Token Muzzie's 145 in Adelbrain, and Skippy Smiffy's 130 up there in the sub-tropics.
But is that what the people want; survival in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, followed by a dead-boring daylight saloon passage on a road of pitch such as the one at the Gabbatoir, which was more like a six-lane highway?
Is that the new, manufactured for television, drama?
The whole thing has just got me completely bamboozled, flabbergasted.
Been saying this for years -- if you want to go about taking Test cricket out of the Intensive Care Unit, then Tubby Taylor's call for Test matches to be reduced from five days to four makes absolutely perfect sense, for mine.
As it stands, watching or listening to the Boxing Day Test and the New Year Test occupies half of the annual leave of the ordinary working man if the matches run their full course.
And there's form for it - before the era of complete silliness and "timeless tests" [1928-39], Test matches were routinely played, more often than not to a result, over four, even three days.
But that was back in the day of uncovered pitches and when over-rates was very rapid indeed, compared to today's placid wickets and the god-awful mind-numbingly pedestrian over-rates.
For chrissake, how long does it take to set a field and bowl six balls?
Four days, four hundred overs, in the time allotted.
If Test cricket is to hang on for grim life, which is currently in grave doubt if the Powers That Be keep fiddling about with it the way they are, that's probably where it should be at.
But that's only my, and Tubby's, opinion.
Clarkey might do it differently.
But there's no difference of opinion about Uzzy; beautiful to watch, style and grace to burn, has all the shots, and his ton over three days in Adders will be the best by far of the summer and remembered for a while yet.
The old boys can just plod along, the rookies can keep looking over their shoulders, but having been shamefully and shabbily treated by the now former selectors, The Uz-Man is the real deal and he's here to stay with a glittering career ahead of him.
But please, please, let's just go back to the clear light of day where everyone can plainly see what the faark is going on, and for the love of Joisus, stop messing about with lunch and tea.
It is, after all, the most civilized sport in the world - the only game that stops for afternoon tea.
What's broken about that?
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