Some time later this year, Channel Nine, through their fully owned subsidiary Cricket Australia, will "compensate" the Australian and South African cricketers for playing a Test match under lights with a pink ball in Adelaide. Again. Last year's inaugural day-night Test match had cricketers "compensated" to put on happy masks over their disappointment with the quality of cricket they were producing, and their discomfort with how the bespoke ball and pitch distorted the contest that five-day cricket should be. Not just a group of grumpy mercenaries, they genuinely believed that Test cricket ought to be better than a game of TV trial and error.

Boo hoo, said the television audiences, the broadcaster and CA. Think of the bigger picture, saving Test cricket from irrelevance. This counter argument wasn't without merit, but it did seem, if you were at the game and steering clear of the Kool-Aid, that there was a conspiracy of television against reality. Watching from the stands, I found it extremely difficult to see the ball. The cricket lacked intensity, as tentative players felt their way. But on the TV screen, the pink ball looked fabulous and the entertainment was rich. Turn the sound on – was it Tony Archer who said we watch sport with our ears? – and there was the cheer squad extolling how great this was. Wickets were clattering and an action-packed finish ensued, a refreshing change from the draw in Perth the week before.

I walked around the ground. Nearly 50,000 people had come! Surely they were voting with their feet. But from every vantage point the ball was equally hard to see. This is part of cricket, yet not part of night cricket. Conditioned to seeing the white ball, to evening sessions building to a result, and to warmer evenings during the BBL/ODI season, the audience were soon voting with their feet again, marching for the exits or the big screens inside the hospitality tents, long before the close of play.

The conclusion was simple, if a little disturbing. The further you were from the game the better the day-night Test match was. For those on the field it was manifestly unsettling. For those in the Adelaide Oval it was a novel occasion (and Adelaide folk will, let's be honest, turn out en masse to see two poets argue about the dithyramb versus the iambic pentameter, or to see the Clipsal 500) but not compelling enough to stay to the end. On the other hand, if you were on the couch in Sydney or Melbourne this was the future of cricket and the players should just take their compensation and be happy with it.

Like a lot of pushing and pulling in the world of sport it raised the question of who games are for. Participants or spectators, administrators or broadcasters? Those who have skin in the game due to dedicating their lives to it or those who put up the cash? Those who worry about the present or those with an eye on the future? Conflicts between all these "stakeholders" were stirred up, principally a false opposition between selfish players on the one side, and the public (represented by their white knights at CA and Nine) on the other.

There are parallels across the codes. What are the debates about golden point in rugby league, and replays in AFL finals, about if not who these games are for? Wayne Bennett, in his consistent opposition to golden point, is representing player welfare. Of all the people involved in a rugby league match, no doubt the players are the least perturbed about drawn matches. Sometimes it's the fair result. For a hundred years, spectators accepted that too.

But a few years ago, a draw became intolerable to broadcasters and the league, who brought in, over the players' objection, extra time. It has left us with the drudgery of golden point. Oh God, not a field goal. Many years ago the league had the good sense to introduce the differential penalty to limit the possibility of a penalty goal deciding a game. I wish they would ban the field goal altogether. As a spectator, I hate golden point because I hate field goals. Setting up for a field goal brings out the worst in rugby league: plough your field position, put blockers in place, hope your drop-kicker is good enough. If I wanted to watch that I'd watch rugby union. The best extra-time I saw last season was Broncos-Roosters in Brisbane, when the Broncos stuffed up their field-goal strategy and scored a brilliant try instead. The grand final? A magic finish – for Michael Morgan's pass to Kyle Feldt for that try in the corner, not for Ben Hunt's dropped ball and Johnathan Thurston's dropkick. I know a lot of people like tension resolved this way, but a lot of people thought the 2003 Rugby World Cup final was the best thing ever. A lot of people like penalty shoot-outs in football. A lot of people would like games decided by a MasterChef challenge.

Recalcitrants are reminded of the "bigger picture", but what is the bigger picture? The contrivance of a gimmick or the weight placed on the game itself? The cricketers who don't want to play Test cricket as an experiment, just like the league players who don't want their work to boil down to field goals, are conservatives in this sense, but are they reactionaries? Maybe they just see the essence of their sport as worth preserving. And it's not true that all of the fans are lined up behind the money, demanding instant-result football and fast-forward cricket. Many of us think that if you degrade what is at stake in the service of tonight's TV ratings it is you who are losing sight of the bigger picture. Day-night Test cricket? By all means do it when you have developed a better ball, but don't call last year's experiment an unqualified success when it wasn't. Instant results in football? Sure, but find a better way. (Hint: a tennis tie-breaker works, because it's a test of tennis.) Out here in fan land, we don't all need instant gratification, and we can't all be bribed.