In reply to:

A lovely friend wrote that he was going to a test cricket.

I suspect that your friend may well have said that he was going to a cricket Test (short for Test match). A Test is any sporting fixture between national representative sides, at least, it is in cricket and the rugby codes. A Test match in cricket is a fantastic thing to watch, it's like chess on a field, although for large parts of its five-day existence, it can seem somewhat less athletic than chess.