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The Spin | Stop moaning about draws – they’re part of the fabric and majesty of Test cricket
Is anything about drawn Test matches more irritating than how irritated everyone seems to get by them?
For all the damnation and disappointment sparked by the inevitability of the result, there was something fitting about last week’s first Test between Pakistan and Australia ending in a draw. This, after all, is the spiritual home of stalemate: though only 32% of the 2,345 Tests in history have been drawn, in the first half-century of Test cricket in Pakistan 51% of all matches ended without a winner (65 of 128).
Between October 1961 and March 1984 England played out 11 successive draws there, including three of the five all-drawn series Pakistan hosted in that time. Fully 69% of all Tests played in Pakistan in the 1960s were drawn, followed by 71% in the 1970s and 56% in the 1980s. Returning to the country for the first time in 24 years Australia picked up where they had left off, with a seventh draw in their last nine matches there going back to 1988.
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