A still from ‘The Test’

Around halfway of the second episode of the latest season of The Test, drama erupts.

English batter Jonny Bairstow ducks a bouncer, the ball goes to the keeper and the batter walks out of the crease. Pretty much a normal thing that happens during a Test match, you’d think. But there’s tense music in the background, almost like you know something is going to happen.

And then it does. Bairstow walks out of the crease thinking the over was done, and wicketkeeper Carey has thrown at the stumps and is claiming a dismissal.

“Sort of within one ball yeah, it happened,” Alex Carey recalls in the docuseries.

The crowd at Lord’s Cricket Ground would go on to chant, “Same old Aussies, always cheating,” even as a disappointed Bairstow exits.

It’s the equivalent of an action-packed interval block in the movies, the kind that leaves you on a high as you make your way through to the bathroom, probably grinning all the way at how good it is.

The current season of The Test, a sports docuseries that follows the Australian men’s cricket team, throws up such excellent moments. Following the Bairstow runout, Alex Carey is made villain in the eyes of the English public, something that affects him mentally, which his teammate Steve Smith reveals in the documentary.

The Test almost resembles a movie made on war, because of the format’s nature to be over five days. Every day, every session has some sort of an event that makes it special, and that, at times, seeps into the next day as well, as a new battle ensues. Like the one revolving around the Aussie bowling and the English openers in Old Trafford that highlights what essentially Bazball is. For the uninitiated, Bazball refers to aggressive, ultra-positive way of playing Test cricket. It makes this format far more exciting that you’d think.

Flashbacks are seldom interesting in films, but in such sports documentaries, it provides context and adds to the drama. Like that of Travis Head, who doesn’t touch a bat for weeks due to his wedding and shows up big time at the World Test Championship against India. Or Nathan Lyon, off tour due to a calf injury – the events of him walking out to bat under such circumstances were dramatic – and watching the rest of the series with his wife in his drawing room back in Australia, while his teammates slog it out in England.

Directed by Sheldon Wynne and Adrian Brown, The Test also cleverly brings in the highs and lows of the game; case in point being how the Aussies, after being in the game in the last Ashes Test at the Oval, veered off course. Such sports documentaries can be made or broken by editing, and the fantastic editing team ensures that The Test is a good watch. It also has some neat quotes (Marnus Labuchange says, “Cricket is a game of small margins. You can feel like you’re on top and it can flip in a second”).

While Season 3 might not have the appeal of the first season of The Test, which focused on the image rebuilding exercise of the team after the ball-tampering scandal, it does have quite a few highs. One wishes that a video crew was sent to the Australian ODI World Cup campaign too, so that cricket fans got a peek into the journey of Pat Cummins’ winning team, which silenced Indian crowds in the final.

Nevertheless, this season of The Test makes for an engaging, thrilling watch, with a few lessons that could appeal to even non-cricket lovers.

The Test Season 3 is currently streaming on Prime Video

Kuldeep Yadav celebrates a wicket during the third Test match between India and England at Rajkot
| Photo Credit: VIJAY SONEJI

He might look like an accountant accidentally woken up by an alarm beeping too early, hair dishevelled and on the point of complaining. But the smile is never far from Kuldeep Yadav’s eyes, suggesting he enjoys a laugh against himself. “I have become mature,” he told the media at the end of the series against England where he took 19 wickets and brought left-arm wrist spin to the forefront of cricket conversations.

The craft appeals to the romantics. The wrist spinner is capable of looking like a genius one day and a novice the next, adding to the glorious uncertainties.

Since making his debut seven years ago, Kuldeep has played just 12 Tests while missing 56 that India played in that period. You need a sense of humour to survive such vicissitudes. And to retain both fitness and passion while spending so much time on the sidelines. He went back to the drawing board, worked on his run up and his pace as well as his batting and has become the bowler he wanted to be.

May soon be spearhead

India’s discovery of new stars (Dhruv Jurel, Sarfaraz Khan, Akash Deep) and ratification of the potential of a recent one (Yashasvi Jaiswal) have been touted as the gains of the series, which they are. But equally important has been the confirmation of the quality and class of their third spinner who might soon be the spearhead of the spin attack.

Kuldeep, 29, made his mark over a decade ago and now, as he says, he has begun to understand his bowling. It is a difficult art, one of the toughest in the game. Most left-arm spinners, from Wilfred Rhodes to Bishan Bedi experimented with wrist spin early on, and then decided that orthodox finger spin, where the ball spins away from the bat is the better option. Garry Sobers bowled in both styles, but there is no record of how many of his 235 Test wickets were earned by wrist spin.

Wrist spinners tend to be, by the nature of their craft, expensive and inconsistent. It takes a captain who understands this to handle Kuldeep, and Rohit Sharma showed he understood both the bowler and the bowling well. He didn’t hesitate from berating Kuldeep when he fell short nor did he ignore the arm-around-the-shoulder treatment that paid such dividends.

When Kuldeep started his career, the ball bowled that went the other way was referred to as the ‘chinaman’, a term now thankfully erased from the game. This was ostensibly because a West Indies player of Chinese origin, Ellis Achong was believed to have been the first to use it. An English batter stumped off such a delivery walked away cursing. It may be an apocryphal story, though. In any case, he was insulting the bowler rather than christening a new delivery.

Two Yorkshiremen, Roy Kilner and Maurice Leyland might have bowled that delivery a decade earlier, the name suggestive of either eastern magic or the conviction that it could only dismiss a batter who hadn’t played cricket. Kilner was a man of charm who contracted typhoid while coaching in India and died at 37. Over a lakh turned up for his funeral in his hometown. Leyland was better known as a feisty batter who averaged over 50 against Australia. Leyland claimed he was the one to name the delivery because it was ‘foreign’ and couldn’t be called anything else.

Kuldeep may not be aware of the anecdotal history behind the delivery he bowls so well . He may not know that he figures in a novel by John Le Carre who wrote the following in his Agent Running in the Field: “I discuss with the parents of our future daughter-in-law such issues as Britain’s post-Brexit trade relations and the tortuous bowling action of India’s spin bowler Kuldeep Yadav…”

Not that it matters. He is capable of bowling the near-unplayable ball, and that should suffice. The ball that got a set Zak Crawley began its journey as if intending to spin across the face of the bat but then seemed to change its mind and crash into the stumps. This was one of the best of the series.

“It wasn’t always easy,” Kuldeep tweeted a couple of years ago, “but it has been worth it.” Cricket lovers agree.