Not one ticket has yet been sold to a Test match in Australia this summer. In fact, no dates have been announced — except the two that need no announcement, Boxing Day in Melbourne and the New Year match in Sydney — and no one has really noticed.
All that is known is that New Zealand will be here for three Tests in November, the shoulder season, and the West Indies for three in December and January, prime time. A month ago, that felt like the wrong way around. Now, it feels like a snub to the Kiwis and the incorporation of a month-long bye at the height of the cricket season.
Whether Australia was exceptionally good or the Windies lamentably poor in their two just completed Tests doesn't matter. It is impossible to think that their contests will be any closer here. It would be nice to believe that the West Indies could guarantee the presence of, for instance, the ever reluctant Chris Gayle and Dwayne Bravo, but they cannot. The Windies can't even necessarily guarantee to stay for the duration. Eight months ago, they walked out of a tour of India.
There is no point mourning what has become of the West Indies. Australian captain Michael Clarke was at least diplomatic and probably sincere when he said he would like to see the Windies rise again, because he would like to see the game grow everywhere it is played. But his core business as captain, unsentimentally considered, is to reduce it to an Australian fiefdom. He is well on the way again.
Test cricket is a dinosaur, not as a game — still its most elegant form — but in its apparatus. Here it is again, creaking and clanking down the road to its own oblivion. The fixture to which everyone is working was drawn up five years ago, and is set in stone for another eight years, locking in the West Indies and locking out New Zealand for another couple of cycles.
The West Indies have fallen on such hard times that for this Australia series, according to cricinfo, they used stumps from a previous series, with the name of England crossed out with a marker pen. It is depressing to imagine what state the Windies might be in eight years. They are not coming back any time soon.
Of course, drawing up a program is frightfully complex, allowing for three forms of the game, for hemispheres, for delicate politics and for financial viability. Apparently it took 72 drafts to arrive at a schedule for Australia alone last summer, and the death of Phillip Hughes made it 73.
Australia's summer program cannot be reworked because it would have implications not only for New Zealand and the West Indies, but for Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, too. That is the official line.
But in terms of Test cricket, authorities simply have to find a way to be more nimble. Right now, staging the Windies on Boxing Day would do neither country any good. If that reads as patronising of the West Indies, it is surely better than putting them in stocks at the MCG and SCG.
For now, Australia will be left to make the most of a rum set of circumstances. A run of Australian victories probably will create an appetite and a market for more. The Melbourne and Sydney Tests will be insulated to an extent by the big-event mentality: people will come anyway. Then a new year and the T20 World Cup will make a distant memory of it all.
But forgetting is not fixing. Test cricket becomes a more pinched and impoverished game every year, and since the attitude of the ruling cabal is to take what they can get while they can, it is impossible not to be pessimistic about its future. The run of non-stop Ashes series that has acted as rouge this decade is coming to an end, and may be too late anyway. In the past two months, England have lost Test matches to New Zealand AND the West Indies.
