Boring Test Cricket

After my interest in test cricket being the "real" cricket got stirred again during the India-SL 3 Test series, the same interest completely zoned out in a horrendously dull and boring 3rd day's play of the deciding 3rd test between New Zealand and Pakistan at Napier.
After NZ got a sizeabale 250+ lead, Pakistan crawled their way to 128 for no loss by stumps.
Now, this could have been seen as an epic fightback, but after watching intently for over 2 hours I found it painfully dull and uninspiring, from a cricket lovers point of view. There are huge chunks of time in test cricket when absolutely nothing happens. The bowler runs in dunking almost the same thing ball after ball with slight variations and the batsman just defends decent delvieries and takes singles or twos of somewhat poor balls.
I contrast todays experience with the one I had yesterday during the mega-scoring 2nd T20 between India and Sri Lanka. The degree to which bowlers were under pressure to think and variate on each and every ball was amazing. Every ball was worth its weight in gold. One of the lessons of yesterday's match was Ishant Sharma who started off bowling beautifully yet ended up expensive with 2/42 of 4 overs. The reason he was expensive was he began in test mode with short bouncing and seaming deliveries and full, inswinging yorkers. One of those lethal yorkers was a classic test dismissal, bowling Dilshan for a duck. However after that, he carried on in Test mode against Sangakkara and Jayasuriya. He barely varied his pace at all. Therefore, while he got 2 wickets, he ended up expensive. In T20s the bowler needs everything - his test repertoire of full swinging yorkers, and short accurate bouncers to the body (the only test ball that ould be expensive is the one swinging outside off stump, while that can induce an edge in test cricket in the shortest format it allows batsmen to free their arms and whack). Apart from the yorker and short ball, the fast bowler needs a variety of slower balls - the very slow back of the hand knuckle ball, the leg cutter and the off cutter, also the slow bouncer and slow yorker. Every ball needs another strategy.
At the end of the day a bowler succeeds in any of the formats by being unpredictable. That's how a yorker after a succession of short balls gets a wicket, a googly after many leg spinners gets a wicket, a doosra after several offspinners, a quick arm ball after a series of flighted off spinners, an inswinger after several outswingers......
It's unpredictability which rewards a bowler in any of the forms - and the greatest pressure to be unpredictable comes in the T20 format.
Now, with batsmen too, the pressure to score takes them away from careful technique to unpredictable forays with both the willow and the stance. Backing away to the leg-side to make room, the dill-scoop, the moving towards off, the standing ouside the crease to convert a yorker into a full-toss, the reverse sweep etc. etc. etc. etc.
Fielding has to be at its best and so does captaincy, because every ball needs a careful look at the field and a word of advice to the bowler. There is no greater pressure on bowler, batsman, fielder and captain then the marvellous innovation of the millenium - the Twenty20!