Nineteen Windies wickets fell in a day of Test cricket in England recently. Sadder than the fact that it actually happened, was the fact that it didn't surprise a lot of people too much. We didn't rub our eyes in disbelief and even the narrative on whether a once great singer was singing terribly off-key is now an old one. As the emotional voice of West Indies cricket, Fazeer Mohammad, keeps telling us, this fall started a long time ago.

I have recently spent a lot of time in Sri Lanka, a place whose cricketers I have admired greatly for their skill and their modesty. Over three Test matches they were competitive for about three quarters of a day and some might say, that shouldn't have surprised me either. Maybe it just saddened me and expressing surprise was a means of lessening the impact.

Since the events have occurred simultaneously, they are a cue for a discussion on the state of test cricket. In England, where more is written about cricket than anywhere else (in India, we speak more about it, often in loud voices when the team loses; for eg. in a World Cup semifinal), there is even greater concern for Test cricket. It is understandable and yet futile. Understandable, because Test cricket still has strong roots in England; and futile, because they might be clamouring for a past that is never to return.

The grim pronouncements surrounding Windies and Sri Lanka leave me wondering if we are using the wrong metrics to judge teams now. It wasn't that long ago that Sri Lanka had mounted an outstanding run chase against India at the Champions Trophy. And the Windies are the only team to have won the T20 WC twice. In Andre Russell, Dwayne Bravo and Sunil Narine, they have among the three most wanted players in T20 cricket and it wasn't that long ago that Chris Gayle was the reigning superstar of the format. Towards the end of India's short tour of the Caribbean in June and July, I saw the West Indies take apart a pretty strong Indian team in a T20 international.

The time has come then, some might say with justification that it came long ago, to ask ourselves whether the metrics we use to judge players and teams are still valid. Sanjay Manjrekar bemoans, and rightly so, the first class averages of those playing Test cricket now but maybe in the format they are more suited to play, Test and first-class records aren't the right indicators anymore. Players like Sunil Narine, and Lendl Simmons is actually a better example, have first-class records that you wouldn't glance at a second time but at what they are currently doing, they are invaluable. Dickwella and Gunathillake wouldn't have you up in worry the night before a game but they can trouble you over an hour's play.

Test cricket is in contraction mode, has been for some time while the romantics looked the other way (and, dare I say, shot furtive glances occasionally), but we continue to use those metrics to judge the health of a nation's cricket. Maybe cricket is running the 100 metre dash and we are judging the athletes for their endurance over 5000 metres. We don't ask Usain Bolt if he can run like Mo Farah but we want the Windies, the world champions over T20 cricket, to hang in there and fight grittily till the last man at a game that is ten times longer.

Many years ago, I had suggested that we accept that a slow cooked Hyderabadi biryani will have to live alongside a Subway sandwich. Indeed, we have accepted that but I fear we send the kid at the Subway counter to cook biryanis and bemoan his lack of skill. He might well turn around and say, as many in the Caribbean already are, that the queues outside his shop are longer.