You only have to say 'Boxing Day Test' and those who know cricket, as well as a lot of others who don't, will know what you're talking about. In celebrating the fixture, Amanda Dunn also writes of the pleasures of the long game:
[T]he time it takes, and the time it asks me to take, is exactly what is so irresistible about Test cricket. The length of the game is fundamental to its theatricality - its ability, in the modern parlance, to "construct a narrative".
Providing the teams are reasonably evenly matched, four innings can offer wild vicissitudes in a team's or an individual's fortunes, the shift even hingeing, inexplicably, on a single over or ball. It can offer up a gripping contest between a particular bowler and batsman, it can peel back the peculiar psychology of "form" - no matter if the player is in or out of it...
And it allows people to sit out there shooting the breeze about past cricket and present cricket and why and how what is going on before them matters in a way quite unlike anything else. Long may Test cricket prosper and enhance our days.
Returning to the subject of the Boxing Day Test itself, Dunn looks forward to the attention it will demand of her, and others interested, in the period after Christmas day. Lucky lot down there. Why can't we have a Boxing Day Test too? Oh, right, cricket's a summer game. Bloody weather.
