Cricketers love predictability in their environment and hate to be taken by surprise, all the more so strangely enough, in the professional era. Their skills have been honed, through repetition, to such a fine point that it's as if they are reaching for an ideal state where the game can be played as a purified contest between batsman and bowler, two boys in one bubble. To the derision of old-timers, a sneezing spectator at wide mid-on is now enough to have the game halted.
Unpredictability, and the possibility that something will arise that has not been planned for, is the main reason it has taken 37 years for the first day-night World Series Cricket Super Test to give birth to the first day-night Test. That elephantine gestation owes to an inherent conservatism in the game. As Chris Rogers wrote this week, a Test cricketer is placing his career on the line every time he plays. The rest of us, impatient for spectacle and for innovation, often forget that the combatant is not asking what is best for the game or what will benefit a larger cause, but whether his career will survive the next week. Losing sight of a green-stained pinkish ball against a particoloured background in dusky light is the very last thing that cricketer needs.
As a leading indicator for the Adelaide Test match, perhaps we shouldn't be talking about the ball so much as the wire. In this case, the wire from which Spidercam is suspended.
In the Sydney Test match last January, Steve Smith, normally an excellent pair of hands, fluffed a straightforward catch when he became distracted by the Spidercam wire. Channel Nine vehemently denied the ball touched the wire. Some on the field were equally adamant it had. Either way, whether or not there was contact is hardly the point. What we learnt that day was that the full-time modern cricketer is so thoroughly drilled, so painstakingly prepared, that the sudden intrusion of a rogue factor – Donald Rumsfeld's "unknown unknown" – can so discombobulate the mind that the simplest task, a catch Smith would take 999 times out of a thousand, becomes fiendish. Full-time cricketers are like the opponents Sun Tzu described in The Art of War when he advised warriors to "Engage people with what they expect", because their "predictable patterns of response" made them vulnerable to "the extraordinary moment – that which they cannot anticipate".
Smith's moment of panic around that extraordinary moment in Sydney might have left a hint to the main battle taking place in Adelaide over (we hope) the next five days. It is a battle in the mind, where both teams will have taken every possible measure to anticipate everything that might happen with the pink ball, the variations in light, the change of atmosphere in the evening, and so on, to harness the unfamiliarity of this experimental match and bring it into the circle of knowns that players have trained their whole lives to expect.
In the effort to anticipate the contingencies, NSW, supplying the bulk of the Australian team, have played three pink-ball day-night Sheffield Shield matches on the Adelaide Oval in the past three seasons. They will have thought the most and talked the most about the pink ball: how to bowl it, how to face it, how to field and catch it. They will have considered tactical factors on the field – for example Smith's decision to declare in the dark and stage a new-ball ambush in the recent shield match – and off the field, where their medical staff will be advising them closely on how to come down and sleep each night after late finishes, before turning up bright-eyed the next afternoon. This will certainly sort the owls from the larks. It will be a big Test match for the pharmaceutical companies.
Controlling every outcome has also been the preoccupation of Cricket Australia and its ball supplier Kookaburra. We can believe James Sutherland's assertion that unprecedented rigour and care have been taken in the development of the pink ball. But you could say the same for the red ball, and look what happened last week. If the pink ball starts losing its shape as well as its colour, will there be enough replacements? Will there be a mysterious James Bond-style metal box containing sufficient pink balls 10, 30, 50, 70 overs old? And how about if a captain sticks with the old one? How does the pink ball look after 110 overs? How many unknown unknowns are there?
As with any arrival at a new frontier, the easiest thing is to forget the obvious. Whatever else is going on, this is still a game of Test cricket. Each day's play will consist of 540 discrete contests between bat and ball, and in a certain number of those contests, things will happen that nobody has made a plan for – not because it's a day-night match with a pink ball, but because it's Test cricket. Weird things always happen. The prospect of this match is so fascinating because it promises to show us who can best expect the unexpected, and who can keep their head when the unforeseen becomes real.
