England must start investing in opponents to make these summer series work

A sporting contest is a zero-sum game. For one team to win, the other has to lose.

Test cricket is like this, too. But the health of the sport is different: it does not just depend on winning, but on finding adversaries who are worth defeating. As they beat West Indies 3-0 earlier in the summer, at times it felt like English Test cricket was losing even as the team were winning. In a summer brimming with elite sport, the comparison was not flattering for Test cricket, for all England’s excellence.

No matter that they have not played a Test here since 2016, Sri Lanka have a template for how to adjust to English conditions.

In 1984, before their first Test in England, Sri Lanka played six first-class games in the country. Acquainted with the demands of batting in England, Sri Lanka reached 491 for seven declared and dominated the drawn one-off Test.

Fourteen years later Sri Lanka arrived in England as world champions. Piqued to still be considered worthy of only a solitary Test, Sri Lanka acclimatised for seven weeks, playing five first-class games. At The Oval, Sri Lanka plundered 591 and Muttiah Muralitharan took 16 wickets in a glorious 10-wicket win. Never again would England invite Sri Lanka for only a perfunctory Test.

The equation – long first-class preparation, before a token Test – has been inverted. Playing a three-match series, Sri Lanka are doing so after preparation of a sort that the class of 1984 or 1998 would have recognised as inadequate for a one-off Test, let alone a multi-match series.

Before this series, Sri Lanka played only a token first-class game when they were thrashed by England Lions in Worcester. “The conditions are quite different to Asian countries, so yeah we wanted to play a few matches,” captain Dhananjaya de Silva said before the opening Test. “But that’s what we get.”

Earlier this summer, West Indies also played only a routine game before the Test series in England. West Indies’ match was not even first-class: a circus in which 17 tourists played against 13 from a ‘county select XI’ – essentially, the best of those unwanted by county first XIs in the same week. It was like a pianist preparing to play Chopin by playing chopsticks. The Lord’s Test, devoid of sporting tension, instead doubled as West Indies’ warm-up for the last two Tests, when they were more competitive.

Given similarly inadequate preparation, Sri Lanka showed resilience to reach 236 all out at Old Trafford, 115 more than West Indies mustered in the first innings at Lord’s.

Yet, Sri Lanka’s collapse to 113 for seven still betrayed how they had been stymied by the schedule. Angelo Mathews left a ball alone that was crashing straight into his stumps, the antithesis of the judgment that he had displayed when authoring Sri Lanka’s series victory in 2014 with 160 at Headingley. The difference in outcomes reflected the difference in preparation. Before his century in Leeds, Mathews had been in England for six weeks; this time, scarcely a week.

Despite the Test falling in the middle of summer, and very reasonable ticket prices, there was not a full house at Old Trafford. Worse than the 2,000 empty seats was how easy it was to understand why fans would stay away.

The underwhelming spectacle, at least until 70s from de Silva and Milan Rathnayake orchestrated a partial recovery, was not really Sri Lanka’s fault. The side who lined up at Old Trafford was adorned with six men averaging over 40 in Test cricket; all were denied a proper chance of maintaining their records in unfamiliar climes.

Every two years, England welcome India or Australia for five-Test summers. However captivating these contests, they leave the question of who England play against every other year. Since the power grab at the International Cricket Council in 2014, Australia, England and India have hollowed out the financial resources enjoyed by their rivals. This would make a certain sense for a Premier League football team. But in international sport, the entire business model rests upon enough compelling opponents for fans to watch at grounds or on TV.

Enlightened self-interest, if nothing else, demands that England’s opponents are given more scope than West Indies and Sri Lanka this summer to show their best. Ultimately, this should take the form of changes to revenue distribution at the International Cricket Council – perhaps a restoration of the Test cricket fund, to help opponents fund more matches. Such funding could mean that, like Pakistan in 2018, tourists play a Test in Ireland before meeting England. Hardened, Pakistan then crushed England in the series opener.

More A teams from countries outside the big three could be welcomed, especially in the two years preceding a Test tour. Tourists should also be offered a couple of high-quality first-class games in preparation for the Tests, perhaps even at the grounds that they will subsequently play against England on.

Strengthening opponents would mean more arduous days at home, and perhaps even more defeats. Yet the risk of not doing so is greater: fans left put-off by Tests that aren’t against Australia or India, and less willing to pay for the match tickets and television subscriptions that sustain English cricket.