by Simon Wright

Created on: July 13, 2009

How do you like your cricket? Do you like it as a test of skill and endurance over five days? Or perhaps you like the one day version, with matches decided within 100 overs? Or maybe you're a crash, bang, wallop type of person and prefer the recent advent of Twenty20 cricket where matches are decided within about 3 hours? There's certainly plenty of choice and, of course, liking one form of the sport doesn't precude you from also loving the other variants.

Let's look then at the three forms of cricket. We'll start with the longer more traditional form of the sport and work our way down to the sport's feisty youngest child, Twenty20.

We'll see along the way that the first ever international cricket match was contested by the United States and Canada, and that cricket now encompasses nations as diverse as Bangladesh, Kenya, Ireland and the Bahamas.

Test Matches (5 day cricket):

Test matches are played over five days, and both sides have the opportunity to bat twice provided that there is time within those five days. The point from when a team goes in to bat and when they have been all bowled out is called an innings, so the idea with test cricket is that there can be four innings during the duration of the match. What really sets test cricket apart from its shorter version cousins is the fact that there is no time or over restriction when a team is batting, other than the fact that the match must be completed within the allotted five days. An over, incidentally, is a term used to describe the set of six bowling deliveries that a bowler is allowed to have before the next bowler steps in to bowl.

The fact that test matches are played over a considerably longer duration means that batsmen have less pressure to score at a rapid rate, unless they find themselves chasing a big target that the other side has set. Batsmen can generally be judicious about which balls they decide to go after and which they defend. This, in turn, means that bowlers have to rely more on skill than luck in order to get batsmen out. For this reason, test cricket is often described as the ultimate test of cricket players' abilities.

There is also more strategy involved in test cricket. If one team has got in first and racked up a very big score, they might be tempted to declare their innings and put the other team in to bat, rather than continuing until their whole team have been bowled out. The advantage of this is that it gives them more time to bowl the other team out but, of course,

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