EDITORIAL: Test cricket both meditative & uniquely seductive

Every year or so, a video of an Australian, or Brit or other Commonwealth citizen explaining the sport of cricket to a bewildered American will rack up millions of views online.

The latest edition of this well-worn sub-genre of internet virality features actor Russell Crowe and podcaster Joe Rogan.

Australian Crowe, cousin to New Zealand greats Martin and Jeff, held Rogan — who first rose to fame as a commentator for the UFC, a sport not known for its nuance — spellbound as he explained the uniquely seductive, meditative allure of Test cricket.

It’s easy to understand why these videos touch strike such a chord with those from cricketing nations.

It takes an outsider’s perspective to bring into focus the absurdities of a game which is so woven into the DNA of our nation.

You mean a single match goes for five days? Interspersed with morning and afternoon tea and lunch breaks?

And the rules are determined by a bunch of toffs at a 238-year-old club who grandly declare themselves the world’s “custodians of the Laws of Cricket”?

And the game’s most fiercely contested trophy isn’t cast from gold like the FIFA World Cup, or a 16kg monster like ice hockey’s Stanley Cup, but is instead a preposterously minute perfume jar, which is said to contain the remains of a charred bail but no one is game to check if anything is actually inside?

And in the case of the Ashes, the biennial game played between England and Australia for that tiny makeshift urn, there are actually five of those five-day Tests to play?

Australians marvel at the stranger sports of the Olympics every four years — the curling, the synchronised swimming, the indoor handball — but the truth is our national sport is the most ridiculous of the lot.

What other sport turns the length of turf into a topic of furious debate? Where offhand sledges become legend, repeated for decades after the players have retired?

This is a game so heavily rooted in tradition and nostalgia that an English side playing in a somewhat more aggressive style than is customary can come to be regarded as a cultural revolution.

As for us Australians, we like to think of ourselves as a laid-back lot, but summer turns us into a nation united by a collective neurosis as we obsess over batting stances and run rates, checking and refreshing long-range weather forecasts.

It unites us as Australians, and it unites us as a Commonwealth, a reminder of our nations’ long shared history.

Test cricket is a strange anachronism in today’s attention deficit-riven society. Our brains have been conditioned to want information in 30-second chunks. Yet every summer we manage to pull ourselves away from our phones and allow ourselves to be hypnotised by the thwack of red leather against English willow.

Cricket is a game unparalleled in its ludicrousness.

And it is magnificent.

Responsibility for the editorial comment is taken by Editor-in-Chief Christopher Dore.