Cricket's new landscape could mean less is more for Test matches

Great news out of South Africa: 3 Team Cricket, the newest format of the game in which three teams play each other simultaneously, finally has a launch date. The inaugural 3TC event – featuring eight-man sides captained by AB de Villiers, Kagiso Rabada and Quinton de Kock – will be held at Pretoria’s SuperSport Park on 18 July.

“I can’t think of a more appropriate day on which to hold this game than Nelson Mandela Day,” said Jacques Faul, chief executive of Cricket South Africa. And indeed, it’s possible this is exactly the utopian vision that sustained Mandela through his long years of incarceration: an end to apartheid, a free and democratic society, a novelty game where three teams take it in turns to bowl against each other in six-over segments.

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According to the conventional laws of internet cricket discourse, this is exactly the sort of thing people like me are supposed to hate: a perfect wedge issue upon which to enact cricket’s tiresome culture wars. Hey, I love two-team cricket as much as anyone, but there’s a financial reality out there. We need to appeal to the family market and all the research indicates women and children prefer their sporting contests in triplicate. It’s the way of the world.

The more prosaic truth is that 3 Team Cricket strikes me as a rather intriguing experiment: a bespoke solution to the frequent problem of diminishing access to facilities and the difficulty of assembling 11-player teams at amateur level. Moreover, it feels a strangely fitting tribute to cricket’s timeless and restless adaptability that at the same time as embracing yet another new format, it is also welcoming back the very oldest.

Yes: Test cricket is back. In a way, the Ageas Bowl is the perfect place to induct international cricket’s new post-pandemic era: a soulless bowl just off the M27 with its own two-mile biosecure radius from anywhere remotely interesting. Still, as England and West Indies face off for the first Test on Wednesday there will doubtless be plenty to divert us. The pace shootout between Jofra Archer and Mark Wood, Kemar Roach and Alzarri Joseph. Jason Holder and Ben Stokes – two of the world’s great all-rounders – going toe-to-toe. The sight of Joe Denly painstakingly making his way to 30 before, invariably, playing across a straight one.

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Naturally, there will be a note of dissonance too: the empty stands a reminder that this is essentially cold product, a contractual obligation, albeit one only made possible by the admirable cooperation of the tourists. For all the familiar rhythms that will resume on Wednesday morning, the celebratory mood, perhaps even the veneer of normality, these are strange and vividly uncertain times for the international game, which is, as ever, being squeezed between the rock of commerce and the hard place of protectionist self-interest.

Take, by way of example, the context in which England v West Indies is putatively taking place: the cursed ICC World Test Championship, which has developed a considerable fixture backlog. With no prospect of clearing it before next summer’s Lord’s final, the options are either to truncate and render the whole tournament a farce or postpone and renegotiate the entire 2023-31 international calendar and rights cycle.

The problem in both scenarios is the same one that has bedevilled international cricket for years: essentially, the most powerful nations will seize on the opportunity to chop out the bits of the calendar they don’t want. Bangladesh have had four series postponed. Cricket Australia has just pulled the plug on a one-day international series against Zimbabwe. The historic day-night Test against Afghanistan at Perth in November could be next.

Meanwhile, all this is taking place against a backdrop of unprecedented lean times. Cricket West Indies has halved the salaries of its players and staff. Afghanistan’s coaches have had their pay reduced. Cricket Australia launched a botched and drastic cost-cutting drive that ended up costing the chief executive, Kevin Roberts, his job. Even India, the game’s financial bloodstream, has been forced into economies, with no Indian Premier League revenue and its new sponsorship deal with Nike estimated to be down 30% on the last.

This is the fractious and fearful landscape into which international cricket returns and what is already certain is that the game that emerges from the pandemic will look very different from the one that entered it. With bilateral series becoming even less viable, international cricket could end up losing further ground to franchise T20 leagues. If this sounds like doomsday, then with a little imagination and foresight it need not be.

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The contraction of international cricket and overseas travel could end up reconnecting us with our long-neglected domestic clubs and leagues. Fresh ideas and innovations – yes, even 3 Team Cricket – could have room to flourish. “As the role of money diminishes,” the Zimbabwean cricket writer Tristan Holme observes in a fine Cricbuzz article, “the cultural value of contests will have a bigger say in determining what games get played.”

What of Test cricket? Inevitably there will be less of it, but what remains may end up being more meaningful as a result. With the right promotion, the oldest and slowest form of the game may even be able to find its niche. Perhaps in a marketplace dominated by size, volume, noise and immediacy, a game that lasts for ages and is restricted to a few prestige fixtures will offer an irresistible point of difference.

Maybe, on reflection, this is the break Test cricket has been waiting for: a chance to lean into its empty seats, make a virtue of its stillness, embrace the silence.