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Could a Test match World Cup save the longest format?
Fans in England can, not unreasonably, ask exactly why Test cricket needs to change. The problem is not empty grounds; it is finding a ticket. And with good reason: Test cricket in England is consistently enthralling, offering an optimal balance between bat and ball. The past three years have featured two oscillating five-Test series, against India and Australia, and the intriguing tussles with West Indies and Pakistan last summer. The next 14 months also bring the deeply contrasting challenges of tours to India and Australia.
Yet to focus only on the vibrancy of Test cricket in England would be myopic. Elsewhere in the world, the story is of a surfeit of two-Test series lacking any overarching context, and many players preferring a more lucrative career in the shorter formats rather than committing to Tests. Most Test matches around the world not involving Australia, England or India lose a net amount in the region of £400,000. In 2018, the ECB included the “status of Test cricket” as a major threat to its future financial stability for the first time.
Just because Test cricket has always bumbled along is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. We are in a more time-poor age, consumption habits have changed, and the global sports, and entertainment, markets are more competitive than ever.
The hope of the World Test Championship — some form of which had been proposed since Boston Consulting Group’s suggestion in 2008, after being commissioned by Cricket Australia — is that it would provide a thread to hang all of Test cricket together, driving up interest among fans and broadcasters. Imposed upon the existing bilateral fixtures, the Test Championship always looked like a sticking plaster rather than a panacea. It has been stymied by an inequitable structure (not everyone plays everyone else) a confusing points system and simply being too long: 22 months from start to finish, which is longer than any other international sports league. As the new ICC chairman Greg Barclay has accepted, it hasn’t worked.
But if the designers of the World Test Championship were wrong in their medicine, they were right in their diagnosis. There is no format of international sport with a remotely comparable structure to Test cricket: essentially, no real structure at all, with the fixtures each side plays dependent on historic rivalries, politicking and economic clout rather than performance. A few years ago, as New Zealand rose to No 2 in the Test rankings, their coach Mike Hesson pleaded for more three-Test series against the biggest sides. They haven’t happened, because a country’s fixtures are not determined by sporting merit. Success is not rewarded; nor is failure really punished.
The biggest problem of all, perhaps, is simply that most Test sides lack a tangible final destination like the World Cup, or, indeed, domestic T20 leagues, which build clearly to a denouement. With the Ashes, England are very different. But what of New Zealand or Pakistan? Even if they had the best Test side in the world, their diet of largely two-Test series would remain unchanged. A structure worthy of the name would allow any team to rise to the pinnacle of the Test game if they had the talent, regardless of their history or the size of their economy.
How a Test World Cup could work
When discussing how to devise a structure to keep Test cricket relevant in as many countries as possible recently, a senior figure in cricket broadcasting suggested that part of Test cricket’s problem might be the very idea of series. In too many contests between many mid-ranking Test sides, interest only wanes over a series. Series also create the scheduling problem that led to the World Test Championship comprising two years.
So perhaps the best idea for a global showpiece of Test cricket is something more like a Test World Cup. For, say, four months every four years, the schedule could be given over to Test cricket. Teams could be divided up into, say, two groups of five or six, playing a Test against each team in their group at home and away or just in one Test.
The top two teams in each group would then advance to the semi-finals, preceding the final. The competition could run from, say, late August to early January, allowing all teams to play games during their home seasons; the number of Asian countries also means that countries could play, say, three Tests in three different Asian nations over the course of a month. Playing games across different time zones, with a structure that made every game relevant, would be a feast of Test cricket, allowing for stars to be created, new rivalries to develop, upsets and underdog tales. Unlike the World Test Championship, the structure — with each side playing the same number of games, and each game worth the same number of points — would be fair and easy to understand. For all its novelty, this new system would be in keeping with Test cricket’s love of the epic.
This would complement the rest of Test cricket, not replace it. So between Test World Cups, England’s biggest rivalries would continue to be played in four and five-match series which, to many fans, would remain the pinnacle. For most other nations, the Test World Cup would be what mattered in Test cricket, with teams building up to it over a four-year cycle as they now do to the ODI World Cup. The ICC could support the Test World Cup with hefty prize money — ensuring that, for the four months or so every four years of the tournament, Test cricket was the only game in town, and was not undermined by players preferring more lucrative domestic T20 leagues. Ideally, the entire competition would be run as an ICC event, with the ICC pooling broadcasting rights and selling them around the world.
As Jarrod Kimbers observes in Test Cricket: The Unauthorised Biography, the format is the Woody Allen of sports, always fretting about itself. Glance at Wisden’s Editor’s Notes of a century or more ago, and you will see that it was ever thus.
One sport, two futures
Whatever the fate of the World Test Championship, Test cricket is not about to die. But it is not apocalyptic to say that there are two very divergent possible paths ahead for the most storied version of the game.
In the first path, Test cricket becomes even-more marginalised in most countries around the world. Already, only nine of the 12 Test-playing nations even play more than a couple of Tests a year. It is easy to envisage more of the existing nine going the same way: reducing costs by playing fewer Test matches and, because of playing more rarely, becoming less competitive when they do play.
Under this scenario the big three nations will continue to play extended series against each other, but Test cricket elsewhere will become hollowed out. Two years ago Brendon McCullum — a man committed enough to the format to play 100 Tests — said that “I firmly believe that Test cricket won’t be around in time, because there’s only so many teams that can afford to play it.” The Ashes could become cricket’s Ryder Cup: protected from the ravages of time like a sealed pyramid yet detached from the normal structures of the sport.
The second path is altogether more global. It entails keeping at least eight nations actively engaged in Test cricket, with a structure, like a Test World Cup every four years, that gives all of them something to aspire towards. Even in this optimistic scenario, there will probably be less Test cricket played in the years ahead. But it could be better Test cricket, with all nations competing towards a prize that comes to be as prestigious as the ODI or T20 World Cups, particularly spurring on players from outside the big three, who are denied marquee Test series.
The months ahead will go a long way to determining which of these two paths the sport takes. Incremental reform, or a reversion to the unsatisfactory status quo before the Test Championship, will not suffice. Mocking the Test Championship is the easy bit; charting a vibrant path forward for the format to remain relevant beyond the big three is altogether more challenging.
