India v England: Cricket has become boring, let’s hope for a great series - Chris Waters

As England and India embark on a five-Test series, the format badly in need of a classic encounter, that restaurant music continues apace.

In Bangladesh, South Africa and the Middle East, T20 tournaments are now under way - here today, gone tomorrow events devoid of meaning or impact on the memory.

The Australian Big Bash has just finished after 48 days of comparable white noise and, next month, the Pakistan Super League fires up again, to be followed by the Indian Premier League and, before you know it, America’s Major League Cricket - just days after the T20 World Cup has ended in June.

Pretty soon, as a press release from the England and Wales Cricket Board reminded us on Tuesday, the Hundred will be back for “a month of blockbuster entertainment and world-class cricket”.

One can hardly wait - especially as that press release also claimed, fans were last year treated to “memorable music performances” from “a diverse line-up of artists and DJs including headliners Rudimental, the Lottery Winners, DYLAN and Prima Queen”. Why, who could possibly forget?

The musical reference serves as the perfect analogy for the tediously dull route that cricket has embraced, one which has brought many of us to the brink of boredom - if not tipped us over the edge entirely.

The endless glut of franchise competitions is a bit like the modern singles chart replete with its homogenized, auto-tuned material which invariably uses the same sounds, the same songwriting methods with short intros and little or no space between lyrics/vocal lines, uniform production techniques and, of course, the odd profanity or two thrown in for street cred purposes and/or “clean version” sales.

Listening to the singles chart, in fact, is a bit like watching someone hit six boundaries in an over in a T20 game in Dallas or Dubai. Immediately afterwards, you won’t remember anything about the song or anything about the game; that people still pay to listen and watch can neither be fathomed nor refuted.

Thirty years ago, though, there was at least room in the singles charts for different types of music. Thirty years ago this very week, for example, the top 40 featured the contrasting output of Def Leppard, Depeche Mode, Chaka Demus and Pliers featuring Jack Radicks and Taxi Gang, Inspiral Carpets, Tori Amos and Mr Blobby - not exactly Bacharach and David, to anticipate the objections of our more seasoned readers, but you take the point.

What we now have in cricket is a situation in which diversity - although seemingly present through its various formats – is cannibalised all the time by the short-form version.

Even this Test series - as “marquee” as you can get outside of the Ashes and the much-missed skirmishes between India and Pakistan - is being played at what might be called lesser venues, away from the more traditional centres, while the tourists have had precisely no warm-up preparation - unless you count a few rounds of golf in Abu Dhabi.

The series, also missing two of its star turns for now in the form of Virat Kohli and Harry Brook, who are absent for personal reasons, lacks context in the bigger picture of Test cricket itself.

For unless you actually believe that such context is provided by the World Test Championship, a disjointed collection of badly balanced, mismatched and often very short series, or the International Cricket Council world rankings, then you will surely have observed that such context has all but disappeared; indeed, how do we measure this series against the one-sided Australia versus West Indies one currently taking place, or the forthcoming South Africa tour to New Zealand that will also be missing many top players to franchise cricket, both of which devalue the brand?

If the best players are not consistently playing the best form of cricket, in this judgement at least, then how can it be contextualised or the format endure? No, the sport has become increasingly dull when it doesn’t have to be that way at all.

T20 is fine in appropriate doses, but the medicine in this particular case is being administered by lunatics who should be wearing white coats for a different reason.

All of which brings us back to Bazball, that crazy, edge-of-the-seat concept that is doing all it can to flog Test cricket’s dead horse, and which can even go into a Test series now with just one seamer - heck, perhaps the mavericks would have gone into it with no seamers had visa problems not detained Somerset spinner Shoaib Bashir.

So, was that selection madness or a masterstroke on behalf of Messrs Stokes and McCullum?

In a welcome break from cricket’s tedium, we’re about to find out.