Test cricket is still alive!

Who says that Test cricket is dying? Those who missed the Test series between South Africa and Australia (where were you?) may think otherwise, but those who tuned in will remember it for some time.

Dale Steyn celebrates Shane Watson's wicket at Cape Town during an epic Test series between South Africa and Australia

It was a gripping contest between bat and ball in conditions offering something to both teams, where fortunes swung back and forth like a pendulum and in the end, a two Test series just wasn’t enough.

The series kicked off with the first day contest between visiting captain Michael Clarke and Dale Steyn, where the latter was trying to knock off the former’s head. It was worth watching and was a memorable contest (maybe not as memorable as Donald Vs Atherton in Nottingham, but memorable nonetheless), and the series ended with a fantastic run chase by Australia.

That they amassed over 300 on a difficult fifth day track was hugely impressive. It was made possible by 18 year old debutant Pat Cummins who took six second innings wickets and dragged the Aussies back into the contest (recalling their heroics in Port Elizabeth in 1997).

The pitches and the quality of bowling from both sides ensured that there was enough to keep everyone interested, something which hasn’t been seen frequently in recent times. This series is in contrast to the one sided matches being played in India between two unmatched sides (India and West Indies) in conditions heavily favouring the home side. Although, West Indies are showing some fight in the final Test.

Test cricket needs such matches and series as that in South Africa, with contests within contests – champion bowlers against champion batsmen. Above all it needs sporting and result oriented pitches to attract viewers.

A few days back I read an article on Cricinfo mentioning the death of Test cricket after witnessing the empty Eden Gardens stadium in Kolkata for the India Vs West Indies Test match. No doubt the current West Indies side is not a shadow of their glorious past, and crowds won’t flock in to watch them.

But maybe the BCCI also needs to see the pitches in South Africa, England and Australia to know that it’s not Test cricket that is dying.

Rather it is dull, flat or underprepared spinning pitches in India, along with an over crowded calendar of bogus matches which has killed everyone – from the genuine fast bowlers to the spectators.

The death of momentum

The star of Michael Lewis's piece in the new issue of Vanity Fair had the answer to a question that Moneyball left hanging

As Ian Dury once said, there ain't half been some clever bastards, and one of them is Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, even though he's not an economist, he's a psychologist.

Kahneman is the star of Michael Lewis's piece in the new issue of Vanity Fair, a story that fills in a little hole drilled by Lewis's book Moneyball. Kahneman, as you might expect of a man who knocked off a Nobel in his spare time, had the answer to a question that Moneyball left hanging, namely, why, if baseball coaches had spent their entire lives watching baseball, had they got player selection wrong so often, and by so much?

The solution lay in cognitive psychology and something Kahneman called 'the availability heuristic', which was the notion that human judgement is often based on the most easily recalled information. He explained this by means of one of his experiments: a roulette wheel was rigged to stop on one of two numbers, 10 or 65. Kahneman asked the groups he assembled in front of the wheel to write down the number they saw. He then asked them an unrelated question: "What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in the UN?"

The average answer of the groups whose wheel landed on 10 was 25%, and of the groups who landed on 65 was 45%. In other words, the unrelated number affected their guess.

Kahneman called this 'the anchoring effect'. He conducted lots of other strange experiments too, like creating a character called Linda, who "was bright, majored in philosophy and who was deeply concerned with discrimination and social justice". He asked his subjects which statement was more true: i] Linda is a bank teller ii] Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. Eighty-five per cent of people opted for number ii even though it is logically impossible [if number ii is true, then number i must be equally true].

Daniel Kahneman developed all of this stuff into 'prospect theory' which was about economics and ultimately, many years later, won him the big one. A Harvard undergraduate called Paul DePodesta, who had been hired by Billy Beane at the Oakland As, became interested in it. Along with Bill James, their maverick statistician, they exploited the 'willful ignorance' of the baseball player market, and revolutionised the way the game was measured.

Michael Lewis thought of all of this when he stumbled on a letter written to him in 1985 by Bill James. "Baseball men have an entire vocabulary of completely imaginary concepts used to tie together chance groupings," James wrote. "It includes momentum, confidence, seeing the ball well, slumps, guts, clutch ability, being hot and my all-time favourite, intangibles."

Kahneman's work seemed to answer James's question. Baseball coaches often based their judgement on nebulous concepts and 'instincts' rather than empirical evidence of the kind rooted out by James.

Cricket does it too. Australia dropped Simon Katich for being too old in the face of all available evidence: in the previous three years, he was the only Australian batsman to average over 50, had scored more runs, home and away, than anyone else, and two payers who kept their places, Ponting and Hussey, were older than Katich. There are plenty of other examples: how long did Steve Harmison's 7-12 affect opinion of his game?

During an insane day at Newlands on Thursday, when Australia were bowled out for 284 and then South Africa were bowled out for 96 and Australia's second innings score stood at 21-9, Robin Jackman asserted on commentary that "South Africa have the momentum here".

How did Jackman make that judgement? Probably because, in his mind, South Africa taking 9-21 was further forward than the knowledge that Australia were 209 runs ahead on a day when 20 wickets had fallen for 128 runs.

Momentum is king of those nebulous concepts affected by the availability heuristic. In truth, not even Daniel Kahneman could have told you what was going to happen at Newlands on Friday, other than that someone was going to win, because there's almost nothing to compare it with. Try one for yourself: Next time Australia bat, which will be in Johannesburg, how many do you reckon they'll score? Not that easy is it, when your availability heuristic is all over the place.

Cricket's greed is a guilty habit that needs fixing

Cricket must dilute its own rampant gluttony and think harder about who it shakes hands with to avoid further murky episodes

Pakistan's Mohammad Amir receives his man of the series award from Giles Clarke. Photograph: Philip Brown/Reuters

An enduring image of the England versus Pakistan Test series last year was the sight of a visibly appalled Giles Clarke refusing to shake hands with Mohammad Amir – on the very day Amir was first exposed by a tabloid sting – while presenting his enduringly absurd man of the series award. Looking at the picture now the contrast between the pair is still striking: one a misguided naif who accepted large amounts of money from a charismatic older man and ended up shaming a cricketing nation when his sponsor was exposed as a crook; the other a corrupt Pakistani fast bowler.

This is, of course, just a helpful analogy. Clarke was guilty of no more than an error of judgment when he allowed English cricket to become entangled with Allen Stanford, the Texan adventurer who hid his activities so cleverly beneath the impenetrable disguise of a theatrically insincere quasi-messianic egomaniac in a hired helicopter. But the fact remains English cricket's chief executive has found himself face to face with two large-scale cricketing miscreants in recent times. Both have been brought to justice – but it would be misguided to believe that as a result the source of cricket's current soul-sickness has been lanced.

On the day of the spot-fixing sentences plenty of expert legal opinion was on offer. Darren Gough suggested two years in prison would be "a big ask for the three lads". Ian Botham, bellowingly in tune with the domestic zeitgeist, called for longer sentences and decreed: "It is Pakistan's problem. It's not ours." Botham is half right: prison was the right punishment, if only because of the need to establish aggressively the bulwark of deterrence. But he is wrong on another point. This isn't Pakistan's problem. It belongs to all of us and perhaps the quicker we accept this will decide how far the medicine dispensed at Southwark crown court is allowed to travel up the arm.

Most immediately there is the simple shared tragedy of the ruined careers of Amir and Mohammad Asif. Test Cricket exists as a spectacle of minutely refined talents and in Asif and Amir we have lost arguably the finest opening attack in the world. Much has been made of Amir's scurryingly vibrant talent, but Asif is also a master, a highly skilled slow-medium loper, the ball leaving his fingers infused with a snaking intelligence. Watching them in action was a joy and the sense of being cheated extends into this now decapitated pleasure. If you love cricket you will share a little of their punishment – albeit this is an aspect of the fall of the two Mo's few have felt like dwelling on.

There is a wider issue, though: one that looms above and beyond the "rogue dressing room" theory, or even Botham's rogue nation. Most obviously the real bad guys are still out there. The great spreading choking root structure of gambling fraud is still in place and we have simply blown the seeds from the top of a dandelion. But beyond this it is time to talk about something broader. It is time to talk about greed.

Cricket is currently seething with greed. Not just lassoed at the ankle with dimwit fixing scams, but convulsed higher up with ruinous institutional avarice. As Mr Justice Cooke remarked in his judgment, cricket "was once a game but is now a business" – and not a nice business either. At some point in the past decade the new breed of business-reared administrator decided this was how cricket must be now: prostrated before mammon, insatiably profit-driven, committed McDonald's-like to constant expansion as though this is all there will ever be of cricket and it's time to grab it all in great dripping handfuls of marketed crick-crap.

The Indian Premier League may be hoist here as a source of wider cultural contagion. This is no doubt unfair (it is so far untainted by illegal gambling), but the IPL is still an entity that trades on avarice, skewing cricket's internal gravity with its fiscal cult of yahooing brand-incantation and outsized personal enrichment for those who wear its advert-pyjamas. International cricket has also feasted gluttonously, cramming its calendar with the kind of humdrum multiplicity – a seven-match one‑day series, a triangular tournament – from which spot-fixing sprung. It is unintentionally hilarious that the guilty trio should have attempted the kind of scam that might have passed unobserved in a desultory Sharjah bore-fest but that was obvious in the glare of a Lord's Test. It's a bit like trying to pickpocket the Queen during her annual televised inspection of the entire Metropolitan police force, then wondering why you didn't get away with it.

Either way their crime cannot come as a surprise: not just because of the long-tolerated background whispers, but because it is coloured at the edges by aspects of cricket's wider culture. And so justice on this occasion should be passed, not with a gloating swish of the cane, but with sadness, and even perhaps a hand-wringing tinge of liberal guilt. This is a warning from the dock, a hint that cricket could perhaps think of reining itself in elsewhere, diluting its own rampant gluttony, thinking a little harder about who it shakes hands with generally – and sending out a message that at all times it is the game that is sacred, not its disorientating new riches.

Pakistan spot-fixing players and agent sentenced to lengthy jail terms

• Salman Butt jailed for two years and six months
• Agent Mazhar Majeed handed longest sentence

Pakistan cricketers (left to right) Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif and Salman Butt and agent Mazhar Majeed. Photograph: PA

Three cricketers and a sports agent convicted of plotting to bowl deliberate no-balls in the Lord's Test against England last summer as part of a lucrative betting scam have been handed custodial sentences.

The judge, Mr Justice Cooke, ruled at Southwark crown court in London that the offences committed by the former Test captain Salman Butt, the fast bowlers Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif and agent Mazhar Majeed were "so serious that only imprisonment will suffice".

Majeed was jailed for two years and eight months, while Butt was sentenced to two years and six months. Asif was jailed for one year, and Amir for six months. All are likely to serve half their sentences before being released on licence.

Butt, Asif and Majeed are expected to begin their sentences at Wandsworth prison in south London, while Amir is due to be sent to Feltham young offenders' institute. However, his barrister, Henry Blaxland QC, said he intended to apply for bail pending an appeal against his sentence.

The three players were caught after an undercover News of the World reporter recorded Majeed, 36, boasting how he could arrange for Pakistan cricketers to rig games for money. The agent was secretly filmed accepting £150,000 in cash from the journalist.

In his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Cooke said: "The gravamen of the offences committed by all four of you is the corruption in which you engaged in a pastime, the very name of which used to be associated with fair dealing on the sporting field. 'It's not cricket' was an adage. It is the insidious effect of your actions on professional cricket and the followers of it which make the offences so serious.

"The image and integrity of what was once a game, but is now a business is damaged in the eyes of all, including the many youngsters who regarded three of you as heroes and would have given their eye teeth to play at the levels and with the skill that you had …

"Now, whenever people look back on a surprising event in a game or a surprising result or whenever in the future there are surprising events or results, followers of the game who have paid good money to watch it live or to watch it on TV will be led to wonder whether there has been a fix and whether what they have been watching is a genuine contest between bat and ball. What ought to be honest sporting competition may not be such at all."

All four were ordered to pay contributions towards the costs of the prosecution, ranging from £8,120 to £56,554.

Swann targets further improvement

Stand-in Twenty20 captain Graeme Swann says England still have plenty to work on despite finishing a dismal tour with a six-wicket victory over India.

Saeed Ajmal puts Pakistan 1-0 up after Second Test win against Sri Lanka

• Sri Lanka 239 & 257; Pakistan 403 & 94-1
• Pakistan win by nine wickets and lead three-match series 1-0

Pakistan's Saeed Ajmal (second left) celebrates after dismissing Sri Lanka's Suranga Lakmal. Photograph: Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP/Getty Images

The off-spinner Saeed Ajmal took his fourth five-wicket haul in Tests as Pakistan completed a nine-wicket win in four days in the Second Test against Sri Lanka on Saturday at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium to take a 1-0 lead in the three-match series.

Needing 94 for victory, the opener Mohammad Hafeez scored a quickfire unbeaten 59 and knocked off the runs with Azhar Ali (29) after Pakistan lost Taufeeq Umar early.

When Pakistan bundled out Sri Lanka for 257 in their second innings the 34-year-old Ajmal, with five for 68, led the Pakistan spinners, who took eight out of the 10 wickets to fall.

Ajmal ran through the Sri Lanka tail, keeping the batsmen guessing with his doosras, after Abdur Rehman (two for 65) broke a stubborn seventh-wicket stand by dismissing Dhammika Prasad.

Angelo Mathews (52 not out) and Prasad (33) added 56 for the seventh wicket to take the lead closer to the 100-run mark.

Pakistan dismissed opener Tharanga Paranavitana (72) and wicketkeeper-batsman Kaushal Silva (eight) before tea after removing Sri Lanka's batting mainstays Kumar Sangakkara, Mahela Jayawardene and their captain, Tillakaratne Dilshan, in the morning.

Sangakkara, who scored a double century to save Sri Lanka in the first Test in Abu Dhabi, added 73 for the second wicket with Paranavitana before he was given out lbw to Rehman. A fuming Sangakkara stormed back to the pavilion, clearly unhappy with the decision, and was soon followed by Jayawardene, who struggled during his 34-ball stay before being bowled around his legs while trying to sweep Ajmal.

Dilshan was undone by some superb reverse swing bowling from the left-arm seamer Junaid Khan and was struck right in front to a delivery that came in after pitching. Junaid bowled around the stumps to the right-handers and was able to get the old ball to swing both ways, making life difficult for the batsmen on a wearing pitch.

Pakistan are playing "home" Tests in the Gulf region because of security fears in their own country. The final match of the series is at Sharjah from 3 November.

England end tour on a high with impressive Twenty20 victory over India

• Kevin Pietersen hits form to guide tourists to six-wicket win
• First England triumph over India at Eden Gardens since 2006

England's Kevin Pietersen hits out during his decisive innings against India at Eden Gardens. Photograph: Bikas Das/AP

Finally. After the tribulations of the past week, England were able to fly home on a high. In beating India by six wickets at Eden Gardens – not only their first victory over India this tour, but their first of any kind against them here since 2006 – they reaffirmed, indeed enhanced, their newly bestowed status as the world's number-one ranked Twenty20 side to go with their World T20 title.