That first Test match was played at Melbourne in March 1877. This form of cricket normally pits two countries against each other over five days, yet can still end in a draw. Its beginnings were suitably shambolic: England had only 11 players to select from, so everyone available had to play. The other member of their squad, Ted Pooley, the 12th member, was in a New Zealand prison cell after being arrested for assault. The player had attacked a spectator who refused to pay up on a bet in a fixture after pointing out — not unreasonably — that Pooley was umpiring in the game.

Almost immediately, Test cricket became entwined with nostalgia. In 1884, seven years after the first Test, the British newspaper The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News slated the motivations of the touring Australian side. “These Australian adventurous spirits have undertaken their enterprise less for honor than for filthy lucre,” the newspaper said. “Win or lose, they accept their expenses all the same. The present generation of lovers of the once noble game must have seen enough of the Australians to last them for life, and their intrusion into the mother country will henceforth be regarded as a veritable nuisance.”

The funeral notices are still being written today, because the format faces broader challenges around the world. Test matches not involving any of Australia, England and India typically make a net $500,000 loss; the format lacks any semblance of a coherent fixture list; players from smaller countries can often earn more featuring in domestic competitions playing the abbreviated Twenty20 format. A five-day game seems anathema to modern attention spans.

Yet the Ashes continue to fascinate. To judge from the demand for tickets, today’s interest in the Ashes — in both Australia and England alike — could legitimately be declared to be greater than at any point since the immediate years after World War Two, or even ever. And if Test cricket is gripped by a sense of facing an existential threat, it has never known anything else. Indeed, in some ways the 2020s could be considered a golden age for the format. Test cricket today is played by 12 countries, more than at any point in the game’s history; nine of these nations play a minimum of six Tests per year on average. As anyone who has watched England’s buccaneering, aggressive style — named “Bazball”, after their head coach Brendon McCullum — in recent years could attest, on the field the game itself has perhaps never been so captivating. Teams are scoring runs faster than ever before. Draws have almost become extinct.

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Test cricket’s durability reflects the format’s multi-layered richness. The game can be enjoyed in distinct ways. For some fans, the pleasures of the game are aesthetic: the joy that can be derived from the visual beauty and geometry of, say, a cover drive or a leg break. To others, the main pleasures are more romantic: the underdog stories and sense of history being overcome. To another group — although they are less prevalent than in other sports — Test cricket is a tribal game; many casual Australian and English fans alike derive the most glee from inflicting pain on their historic rivals. Finally, in a way distinct from every other sport except perhaps baseball, cricket encourages fans to derive numerical pleasure: the atomized nature of the game, with every ball a distinct event, yields an abundance of statistics, allowing for contemporary greats to be compared to previous giants. To watch a Test match, then, is to feel a connection to the past — in a way that most longform television or streaming, say, cannot ever match. 

Yet there is another more prosaic reason for Test cricket’s survival. The game has an overlooked malleability, as I learned in researching a new history of the format. Since the first Test in 1877, matches have been scheduled to last three, four, five days or six — or even be “timeless”, played to a finish. Overs have comprised four, five, six or eight balls. The umpire’s decision was long held to be final; now, players can challenge decisions using the Decision Review System. Test cricket is no longer even always played with a red ball: now, it is played with a pink ball too, when matches are played at night using floodlights. Since 2019, the format has acquired a league structure: the World Test Championship, which culminates in a final every two years. This competition is now poised to be expanded from nine countries to include all 12 Test nations.

Test cricket has a penchant, too, for becoming an event of political and sociocultural significance. This has been true in a small way of the Ashes, which, fought between a motherland, England, and its offspring, was critical in nation-building: the squad that toured England in 1884 carried an Australian coat of arms 17 years before the six colonies established the Commonwealth of Australia. Later, in the 1932/33 Ashes, England unleashed “Bodyline” bowling — aiming at Australia’s heads — and almost killed several opponents with the tactics. These methods prompted a diplomatic crisis: Australia said that the methods were “unsportsmanlike”, which the custodians of English cricket regarded as the gravest of charges.

But it is elsewhere that the political importance of the game has been greatest. For both India and Pakistan, cricket had a crucial role in their developing a sense of nationhood. But when the sides have met on the pitch, their primary concern has been avoiding the shame associated with defeat. “Avoiding defeat becomes the primary and overwhelming objective” in India-Pakistan matches, observed Pakistan’s Asif Iqbal, who played nine Tests against India. “The result is that both teams play at a level considerably below their full potential and in an atmosphere where fear of defeat is such a major component that often dull draws are the only outcome.” 64% of Tests between India and Pakistan have been drawn, double the overall rate in Test history.

A more swashbuckling approach to the game has long been a hallmark of West Indies. It is a composite side, comprising the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean. After West Indies gained Test status in 1928, it was convention that the team was captained by a white man: a powerful symbol of enduring white domination of the region. The push for a black captain of the West Indies became intertwined with the calls for independence; CLR James, the writer and political activist, championed both causes in unison. In 1960, Frank Worrell finally became the first full-time black captain of West Indies, swiftly leading the side to becoming world number one for the first time in history. In 1962, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago became the first nations once part of the British West Indies to gain independence. In the years that followed, West Indies became a symbol of black empowerment, and during the 1980s were perhaps the finest side in Test cricket history. “I believe very strongly in the black man asserting himself in this world and over the years I have leaned towards many movements that followed this basic cause,” declared Viv Richards, the side’s star batsman.

Test cricket’s most notorious moments, though, have often involved South Africa. From their first Test match, in 1889, South Africa neither picked players who were not white nor deigned to play against them. In 1968, Basil D’Oliveria — who was classed as “Cape colored” in South Africa, then moved to England — scored a brilliant 158 for England in an Ashes Test match. Incredibly, D’Oliveria was dropped for England’s next squad, which would tour South Africa.

The South African apartheid government had seemingly exerted pressure on the England selectors and pushed for D’Oliveria not to be selected. But after a player withdrew through injury, D’Oliveria was picked as a replacement, raising the prospect of South Africa’s team sharing a field with a man not deemed white. South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster, denounced England’s squad as “the team of the Anti-Apartheid Movement”, attacking the “leftist and liberal politicians” who used sport to achieve their “pink ideals” and “to gain certain political objectives”.

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Two years later, South Africa were ostracized from Test cricket. Nelson Mandela came to revere the great Australian batsman Don Bradman — whose batting average of 99.94 remains unmatched in Test history — for his politics as much as his cricket. As chairman of the Australian Cricket Board in 1971, Bradman stopped South Africa from touring the country, effectively confirming cricketing isolation for the rest of the apartheid years. When Mandela was visited by Australia’s former prime minister Malcolm Fraser at Cape Town’s Pollsmoor Prison in 1986, his first question was: “Tell me Mr Fraser, is Don Bradman still alive?” In 1990, when Mandela was finally released after 27 years in prison, Fraser presented him with a bat. It contained an inscription: “To Nelson Mandela. In recognition of a great unfinished innings — Don Bradman.”

In 1992, after the abolition of apartheid, South Africa finally made their Test return. At Lord’s this June, Temba Bavuma, the first black South African to score a Test century and the first black man to captain the country in the format, led his side to victory in the World Test Championship final. Bavuma grew up in Langa, a township just outside Cape Town, playing street cricket before earning a scholarship to one of South Africa’s elite schools. His story attests to another function of Test cricket: as a tool of social mobility. The sight of Bavuma at Lord’s was a reminder of the continued resonance of an idiosyncratic game with an outsized importance. Test cricket, a game that demands 30 hours of attention, has always been an immersive antidote to the outside world. Perhaps the sense of being out of kilter with modernity will not be what kills Test cricket — but what keeps the format alive. 

Victory against all the odds has become a deep-rooted part of our sporting birthright – in some ways its very essence. Ben Stokes, with his fantasy innings in Leeds last Sunday is now firmly cemented onto his plinth in the English sporting Pantheon; and what he did was remarkable — but also entirely in keeping with our traditions.

Sport is the theatre of the improbable. Only a few months ago, Liverpool came back from a 3-0 deficit to beat Barcelona 4-0 in the Champions League semi-final. Something that the pundits thought virtually impossible happened in front of our eyes.

Across sport the players lay before us one unlikely triumph after another; as spectators we gasp and applaud, shower the victors with laurels and sit back, waiting for the next marvel. We don’t know where, when or which sport will deliver – but we know it will happen some time. And it is this unpredictability which keeps us interested; the occasional triumph of the underdog gives savour to life.

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Stokes’ glorious innings was so striking because it combined attributes which seem antithetical; he started, with England in a precarious position — and with evening coming on — conservatively, cautiously and responsibly, and finished, in the high heat of the following afternoon, with a magnificently swashbuckling onslaught. A perfect innings which had even grouchy old Boycott reaching for his thesaurus of superlatives: when the patron saint of Yorkshire pessimism is showering you with compliments, no further proof is needed that something truly remarkable has happened.

It was also a feat which conformed with English sporting history and, thereby, with our history more generally. Because sport – however much some soulless types condemn it as trivial – illuminates important aspects of the national character.

Show me the national team and I will tell you much about the country it represents. Take, for instance, Australia, our best-beloved enemies. In all three matches of this series so far, Australian virtues have been on display. What do we expect from the Aussies? We know they have a ‘winning mentality’ which means, in effect, that, above all, winning matters.

The Australian hero of the first match – that nonpareil of batsmen Steve Smith – was shamed by his complicity in the notorious ball-tampering episode in 2018 in a test match against South Africa. But that episode – disgraceful though it was – told us much about the Australian mentality: first that they can be single-minded and ruthless (even to the point of cheating) in pursuit of victory. But the heavy penalty meted out by Cricket Australia – Smith lost the captaincy, was banned for a year from the national side, and heavily fined – showed it upholding the high ideals of sportsmanship.

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The sporting rivalry between Australia and England, which crosses all sports, but is especially pronounced in cricket and both rugby codes, is the living embodiment of the relationship between the two countries. And our view of them — as theirs of us — is hugely influenced by their sporting character.

We think of Australians as resolute, skilful, athletic and totally committed and also — and this is very important — as possessing the very same virtues that we cherish. We pay them the compliment of thinking that we have a shared view of how the game should be played. There is one big difference though: no Australian would ever want to be thought of as a ‘good loser’ whereas we hold on to that quaint notion. Even in defeat, Englishmen believe, something valuable can be salvaged through the stoic acceptance of sporting fate.

It isn’t just in the case of Australia that sport plays a major role in forming our views. How a national team performs comes to embody, in the popular imagination, the very essence of the country itself. Asked to think of Germany and the average Englishman is likely to have as one of that country’s defining characteristics ‘good at football’ and, by extension, a country which is a formidable opponent when united in common cause.

Or consider rugby and how the Six Nations tournament becomes an annual charivari of national virtues; Scotland, which seemingly every year reinforces the gallant loser stereotype; France displaying its customary national verve; Wales, offering its mercurial and elusive genius; Ireland with its unsurpassed patriotic fervour; Italy… but perhaps best not to draw any conclusions about Italy based on rugby for I don’t wish to be rude. But what the Six Nations adds up to is a portrait of six nations reduced to, but somehow highlighted by, a mere ball game.

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Will Brexit bother the Six Nations?

By Robin Aitken

These thumb-nail sketches embedded in the habitual spectator are not necessarily precise and accurate — they are impressionist and they are not infallible — but they are a way of rendering in human form the abstract notion of ‘the nation’. Individual Germans often defy the national stereotype by being neither humourless nor well-organised, and yet the image of the methodical team-player, disciplined and tough – which in large measure we impute from their performances on the football field – remains valid even if not the whole story. Which brings us back to the significance of Ben Stokes and that innings.

There is a recurrent theme in our history which might be termed the ‘….and then in the nick of time’ motif. So, in moments of maximum national peril, a hero arises, someone who defies the odds; a Churchill, or a Nelson who somehow delivers the nation from impending disaster.

These heroes do not have to be ‘perfect’ men; both Churchill and Nelson were flawed individuals — as is our man of the moment, ‘Stokesy’. Indeed we like our heroes to demonstrate human frailties: if they did not, they would have to be removed from the human family altogether and banished to Mount Olympus. Stokes suffered his own banishment after a brawl outside a Bristol nightclub; the cricketing authorities, made an example of him and he was dropped from the 2017 Ashes series in Australia (in which, incidentally, we were thrashed 4 -0). Which makes his heroics this summer somehow all the more glorious.

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And maybe there is a political analogy to be drawn here – for, after all, politics is, for most of us, just another spectator sport. The past three years since the referendum have been ones of unparalleled political failure; the political class has thoroughly disgraced itself with Parliament obstructing the popular will. But wait! What is this? A new batsman at the crease, a flawed individual with tousled hair and an instinctive optimism about him. Could it be that Boris is about to play an innings that will be the making of his legend? He’s up against it, but then what were the odds against Stokes and England last Sunday?