The second Test match against England at Lord’s has seen further heartache for the Indian team which went into the five match series with the top ICC Test match ranking, ahead of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. A long-lackluster England held fifth place. But with two defeats, the Indian team has a lot of rebuilding to do, and quickly. Captain Virat Kohli said he is “not proud” of the innings and 59 run defeat at Lord’s.

But despite the profound disappointment of Indian supporters and the almost disbelief of jubilant England fans, the five-day game played by the world’s ten first-class Test teams remains an enthralling spectacle. But its future has to be in serious doubt. Forty-one years ago the international cricket establishment was challenged by the World Series Cricket competition set up by Australian media mogul Kerry Packer. He offered top players from every country top dollar to play games which earned large sums from broadcasting rights. The effect of the WSC, apart from abandoning traditional cricket whites and introducing night games which required a white ball, was to channel professional cricket into the one-day game.

What Packer began, the Indian Premier League has turned into a huge sporting event which has established the Twenty20 game as the most recognizable and most widely-followed form of cricket, not just in India but around the world. Purists who harrumph about white balls and players wearing multi-colored pajamas overlook the fact that the original village game in England was always one-day. And the reality is that far more people now follow the modern Twenty20 games than do the traditional multi-day first-class games. Cricket fans no longer have the leisure to sit in the stands to follow a match over consecutive days. And broadcasters are reluctant to commit to full coverage. The game may have a larger body of lore, tradition and statistics than any other sport but it nevertheless has to think of its spectators, the people who, one way or another, pay to keep cricket alive.

Yet the strategy and tactics that can make a five-day Test match so enthralling to watch are being undermined by the one-day game. At its simplest, the latter is all about batsmen piling up the runs before bowlers can pile up the wickets. While this produces a dramatic and exciting game, it is a slog fest in which there are no time niceties, such as the blocking strokes and the extended psychological battle between bowler and batsman. The skills players need to succeed in one-day games do not necessarily equip them for a Test match. After England won back the Ashes from Australia in 2015, the triumphant team embarked upon a series of humiliating defeats, which commentators blamed upon excessive focus on the one-day game. The same cause may be assigned to the present Indian Test team. It is not that there are not outstanding players on the Indian side. There most certainly are. But the psychological switch from rapid-fire Twenty20 to the measured tactics of a Test is not always easy. In addition, modern professional cricketers, who are now more akin to gladiators than chess players, have to work extremely hard for their money and this must take a toll on their strength and concentration.