In the Telegraph, Mukul Kesavan says he has been gripped by passages of play in the Indian Premier League. Kesavan suggests doomsayers like him don't dislike Twenty20 or the IPL, but are apprehensive since it might have repercussions on the longer-version of the game. But, there's hope, since what is happening to cricket has happened to other forms of entertainment - music for example, he points out.

People who prefer Test cricket to the limited-overs forms of the game are often called ‘purists’. This is the wrong term: fans of Test cricket don’t see the long game as the ‘pure’ form of the game: they think of it as the classical form. It is classical because it is a codified, cultivated form of the game, distinct from both local/popular/primitive forms of bat and ball as well as modern abridged variants such as ODIs and Twenty20. Test cricket is classical also in the sense of being (or once having been) authoritative and definitive. Rahul Dravid, for example, chose the players for Vijay Mallya’s franchise on the principle that good Test players ought to be able to play Twenty20 cricket because the four-innings form teaches the Test player a classical technique that can be turned to any purpose, a style for all seasons. He was horribly wrong (as we now know), but this was more than an individual error: it represented the collapse of the classical ideal in cricket.

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Maybe the first-class four-innings game could be reformed, franchised and made into a two-day, day-night, weekend affair with over limits. This mightn’t please the dogmatic classicist, but what’s the choice? A four-innings match played over two hundred overs is considerably better preparation for Test cricket than a two-innings game played over forty. Besides, wouldn’t it be nice to have a first-class league that people actually watched and cared about?