A scene from ‘The Test’
About halfway through the second episode of the latest season of criterionThe play begins.
English batsman Jonny Bairstow dodges a bouncer, the ball goes to the keeper and the batsman walks out of the crease. You would think this is a normal thing during a Test match. But with tense music playing in the background, it almost feels like you know something is going to happen.
And then it happens. Bairstow walks out of the crease thinking the over is over, and wicketkeeper Carey throws at the stumps and claims the dismissal.
“Yeah, it happened in one ball,” Alex Carey recalled in the docuseries.
The crowd at Lord’s Cricket Ground kept chanting, “Same old Aussies, always cheating,” even as Bairstow walked off the field in disappointment.
This is the equivalent of those action-packed intermission segments in movies that you get super excited about as you head to the bathroom, and possibly smile the whole way thinking about how great it is.
The Test: Season 3 (English)
Director: Adrian Brown, Sheldon Wynne
Episodes: 3
Run-time: 56-58 minutes
Story: How the Australian team won the WTC final and won the Ashes series
Current session Criterion, A sports documentary on the Australian men’s cricket team features some of the best moments. After Bairstow’s runout, Alex Carey is made a villain in the eyes of the English crowd, which affects him mentally, as revealed by his teammate Steve Smith in the documentary.
criterion It’s almost like a war movie, because of the nature of the format, spread over five days. Every day, every session has some incident that makes it special, and sometimes, it continues into the next day as a new battle begins. Like this game revolving around the Australian bowling and the English openers at Old Trafford, which highlights what Bazball is basically. For those who don’t know, Bazball is an aggressive, ultra-positive way of playing Test cricket. It makes this format a lot more exciting than you would think.
A scene from ‘The Test’ | Photo Credit: Prime Video
Flashbacks are rarely interesting in films, but in such sports documentaries, it provides context and heightens the drama. Like Travis Head, who doesn’t touch the bat for weeks because of his wedding and goes on to perform brilliantly in the World Test Championship against India. Or Nathan Lyon, who is out of the tour with a calf injury – the events of going out to bat in such circumstances were dramatic – and is watching the rest of the series with his wife in his drawing room in Australia while his teammates are toiling in England.
Directed by Sheldon Wynne and Adrian Brown, criterion The ups and downs of the game are also cleverly presented; for example, how the Australian team lost its way after being in the game in the last Ashes Test at the Oval. Sports documentaries like this can be made or broken by editing, and the brilliant editing team ensures that. criterion It’s worth a look. It has some great quotes too (Marnus Labuschagne says, “Cricket is a game of small margins. You can think you’re on top and it can flip in a second”).
Although season 3 will not have the same charm as the first season criterionThere are many good things in this film which focuses on the team’s image recovery after the ball-tampering scandal. One also wishes that a video crew was sent to Australia’s ODI World Cup campaign as well, so that cricket fans could get a glimpse of the journey of Pat Cummins’ winning team, which silenced the Indian crowd in the final.
Still, in this weather criterion It’s an interesting, exciting film, with some lessons that even non-cricket lovers might enjoy.
The Test Season 3 is currently streaming on Prime Video
