Graeme Smith

Comment: Rob Houwing

Cape Town – The International Cricket Council tends to move with all the stealth of a fully-laden, rattletrap bus crawling up a steep pass.

So don’t expect any significant remedial moves soon, even if Wednesday’s first day in the Test series between South Africa and Bangladesh again made one thing abundantly clear: with a “friend” like your very self, who even needs the ever-more-encroaching Twenty20 “enemy” to help endanger Test cricket’s future?

For events in a snoozy, sultry Bloemfontein clearly demonstrated yet again that the five-day format is very capable of digging its own grave – most notably through outrageously sluggish over-rates which do all too little to broaden the appeal of Tests among cricket’s newer, adrenaline-seeking devotees.

Bangladesh, they of one win (over Zimbabwe) in 55 prior Test matches, are lucky to still be at the Test-match top table in the first place. Were they a league football team, relegation would have been a brutal near-annual certainty, wouldn’t it?

So the least they could do, you would think, would be to engage in a global charm offensive, demonstrating to the world that even if they have obvious and worryingly ongoing five-day limitations, they will at least succumb each time by an audacious sword rather than cowering behind the bushes to simply await the inevitable.

But I’m afraid the latter phenomenon appeared foremost on their minds in the first two sessions of play after they had won the toss and decided -- by inserting South Africa -- not to take the bull by the horns on a track curiously striped by alternate shades of rich green and dull brown.

Their “reward” was one miserly wicket on a weather-curtailed day’s play with the Proteas a whisker shy of the 300 mark, a total of 600-plus very much “on’, and Graeme Smith threatening his near-mandatory double century against the Bangladeshi pea-shooters.

Yawn … entirely normal service in Tests between these two.

Not that one wishes to detract from the clinical throttling of limp prey by Smith and another marvellously stocks-on-the-rise international player of 2008, Hashim Amla.

But almost throughout the two sessions in question, Bangladesh cynically maintained an over rate of 12 to the hour to add to the one-sided tedium. It was low-ambition, cling-on cricket at its worst.

A pitiful 37 had been bowled by the “official” halfway mark of the day, if you exclude the bonus half-hour permitted in the lengthening shadows when light so often becomes a stymieing issue anyway.

And that is criminal when you consider that South Africa lost only Neil McKenzie in that entire period, so it is not as though new batsmen routinely taking guard was an explanatory time-chewer.

Nor was there an unusual tally of wides or no-balls to extend overs dramatically. Consider, too, that Bangladesh hardly possess a four-strong armoury of pace bowlers with run-ups virtually to the fence – indeed, they field only three specialist seamers in Bloemfontein.

Of course Bangladesh are not the only offenders. Captains, and sometimes the broader team collective, of nations right across the Test spectrum are commonly docked all-too-trivial sums of their match fees for pulling the over-rate back to a crawl at their convenience.

It is true that the visitors significantly upped their over-rate in the particularly rain-affected session after tea -- albeit arguably under duress after umpire Ian Gould was heard on the stump-mike to mutter: “You’ve got to make up some (overs) now.”

The instruction came, of course, largely after the horse had bolted with two thirds of the day’s supposed entertainment unnecessarily and cynically muzzled to a playing-tempo crawl by the fielding side.

Amazingly, considering the unavoidable effects of the elements, all but nine of the intended 90 overs were eventually bowled, but the final-session logjam in attempting to make up for a laborious over-rate earlier is becoming an all too common feature of Tests everywhere.

The overs that don’t get bowled, of course, simply disappear into some great phantom landfill somewhere.

Isn’t it high time the ICC finally put its hitherto lethargic foot down?

I believe the solution is for the umpires to more forcefully police, hour by hour, the over rate and insist on a minimum of 14 for each one – and if that is not met, then how about adding 20 or 25 penalty runs on each offending occasion to the batting team’s extras tally?

It’s one, near sure-fire way to keep Test cricket ticking more briskly in these very challenging times for it, even if it won’t necessarily make it “sexier” …