MARCH 28 — One of the best things about my favourite sport, test match cricket, is the way it slowly devours time.

For the uninitiated, which I guess is most people in most parts of the world, at this point I should explain exactly how test cricket, which is only played at international level, works.

Each match is played over the course of five days, with each day containing — weather permitting (the action stops when it rains) — six hours of play, meaning that a match, if it goes the full distance, takes 30 hours to complete.

For a single sporting contest, that is an awfully long time. But that’s by no means the end of it, because each individual match is only one part of a multi-game series, which will usually contain between three and five, and occasionally even six, full matches.

As there is generally a gap of a week or two between matches, to allow the teams to rest, recuperate and travel between venues, it’s clear that a series of several matches, each of which is five days long, can take well over a month to complete.

The currently ongoing series between India and Australia, for example, started way back on Thursday 23rd February, and is only now finally set to conclude today.

A lot can happen in that kind of time frame. It would, for instance, be perfectly possible to go for a job interview, get offered the job, resign from your current position, serve the notice period, have a big leaving party, take a few days off and then start your new job.

Or you could propose to your loved one, hastily arrange the marriage, go away on honeymoon, come back, have an argument, start an affair, show repentance and enjoy a happy reconciliation.

I wouldn’t recommend it, and as Mrs West is looking over my shoulder I must add that I am not writing from experience, but it would be quite feasible to have filled your time just like that since 23rd February... and all the while, India and Australia would have been playing cricket.

Life, of course, is very rarely as dramatic as that. But neither is cricket, and the tempo and rhythms of a test series offer a rich analogy to our humble everyday existences, because for a long time and for most of the time, nothing much happens.

The players are out there, of course, going through the motions, treading water. Just keeping on going. They have to, really; if a 30-hour match was jam-packed full of nonstop thrilling action, fans and players alike would soon become so emotionally spent they’d have to give it all up and lie down in a quiet room.

And so, rather than a constant whirl of crash bang bash smash excitement, test matches instead proceed at their own pace. Leisurely. Calm. Humdrum.

For many people, this is a great weakness. If you’re only able to take an hour out of a busy schedule to watch some cricket and all you see is nothing, what’s the point? Especially in the contemporary culture of instant gratification, we want top level sport to deliver exciting action. And we want it now.

As far as I’m concerned, though, the extended passages of nothingness are what make test cricket unique, because you know what else is like that? Life is like that. Rather than embarking upon sudden job changes or whirlwind romances, we spend our time just living. Ordinary, unremarkable, tedious routines, but living nonetheless.

But, and here’s the twist, all those periods of nothingness aren’t really nothingness at all. Because those spells of apparent inactivity actually play a full part in shaping the rare pivotal moments that truly do shape the course of our lives.

Few of the events that truly matter in life can ever take place without something being done, often over a very long period of time, to make them happen. And so it is on the cricket field, where a slow and gradual build-up of pressure against a batsman can eventually force him into taking a rash shot, totally changing the course of the contest.

A sudden burst of exciting activity comes along to change everything, and nothing is the same again.

Sometimes, important things in life can happen for no particular reason, and the rude interruption of sheer luck can also happen in cricket, with a dodgy bounce or an untimely downpour forcing their will upon proceedings.

In India in the fourth and final test match, both those things happened yesterday.

With the series tied at one win apiece (the third test was drawn) and just over two days remaining, everything was in the balance as Australia went out to bat for their second innings, trailing by a paltry 32 runs.

No more than 20 minutes later, their hopes had been shattered by a devastating burst which removed their top three batsmen, with captain Steve Smith the victim of an unlucky edge onto his stumps while David Warner and Matt Renshaw were undone by excellent Indian bowling.

So now, ahead of the fourth day, India need just 87 runs to win the match and the series, with 120 hours of play effectively settled by 15 minutes of drama.

It is a small total, so surely India will do it, lifting their nation by claiming a prestigious victory which will keep them at the top of the world rankings.

Or maybe it will rain, no play will be possible and the whole thing will end up as an anticlimactic draw. Because cricket, like life, is sometimes like that.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.