One-dayers must be hit for six by test matches

AS A message, the sell-out of all five days of the Ashes test at The Oval fully nine months before it starts is unequivocal: the appetite for test cricket – of a certain quality and in a particular context – remains gratifyingly strong in England.

In Australia, too, enthusiasm seems not to have been dampened by the scheduling of consecutive Ashes series, nor by Australia’s underwhelming performances in the previous two. When tickets went on sale before the 2010-11 Ashes contest Down Under, interest was so strong that Cricket Australia’s website crashed within minutes.

If the public in both countries have made their enthusiasm for test cricket clear – and with more than 70,000 attending last year’s Boxing Day test against Sri Lanka in Melbourne, it is not only England who are a drawcard – then the professional players of both countries are unequivocal, too.

In the most recent player survey in Australia, 95 per cent believed that test cricket was the most important form of the game, while only 3 per cent fewer would prefer a baggy green cap to a milliondollar Indian Premier League contract – although whether that last statistic would stand up to anything other than hypothetical scrutiny is questionable. The Professional Cricketers’ Association in England suggested a similar calibration of priorities, 95 per cent responding that they believed test cricket remained the pinnacle of the game.

So why the worry? Why, with every passing season, does it feel as though test cricket is under threat. Why did former England captain Andrew Strauss, in an interview in 2011, feel the need to raise the alarm? ‘‘I am very much aware that if we are arrogant enough to assume that test cricket will always be there, we are sowing the seeds of our own downfall,’’ he said. ‘‘The administrators are trying to recognise the primacy of test cricket, but there is a difference between saying it and making sure your actions follow.

‘‘We know that Twenty20 and ODIs are more lucrative and something has to give. I’d just argue let’s make sure it is not always test cricket that has to make way.’’

Test cricket has been doing a fair bit of making way, of late. To make room for 13 ODIs in England last summer, and admittedly the Olympic Games, a marquee series between England and South Africa was limited to three tests.

Sri Lanka’s schedule for 2013 is even more bizarre in the wake of their administrators’ desire not to impose a clash between tests and either the IPL or the Sri Lankan domestic Twenty20 competition. To that end, Sri Lanka’s proposed test series in the Caribbean has morphed into a triangular one-day series and the 2013 test series against South Africa has been put back to 2015. It means Sri Lanka will not play any competitive test cricket until the early part of 2014.

‘‘Whither test cricket?’’ is not an easy topic to grapple with for those of us wedded to the notion that cricket’s long form remains the most interesting and subtle version of the game. What right has anyone, after all, to ram their preferences down anyone’s throat?

Why should test cricket be treated like the banks, or the American car industry, and be given life support instead of surviving or falling according to the demands of the marketplace? If the next generation of cricket supporters prefers Twenty20, if they are seduced by the razzle-dazzle of the IPL or the Big Bash League, so be it. The market, and the preferences of those who follow the game, will have spoken.

This squeeze impacts especially on the less financially powerful countries such as New Zealand, whose players cannot resist the allure of the IPL, and the West Indies, where the impact is doubly damaging given that the IPL clashes with their domestic season.

Test cricket may be vibrant in Australia, but the trends remain worrying.

The purported leader of the game, the ICC, does not help the cause it espouses, either. The World Test Championship has been put back until 2017 to accommodate the final instalment of the Champions Trophy, and to appease its main financial backer, ESPN Star Sports, for whom 50-over cricket is a far more financially mouthwatering prospect.

My first step towards an eventual solution (when the present television contracts are wound down) would be to abandon 50-over cricket. I always felt it was a strategic howler to play Twenty20 at international level ( another classically short- term decision made without any strategic thought) and that it should have remained a game to regenerate domestic crowds. With 50-over cricket selling well, there was no need to muddy the international waters.

It is too late for that now – and the Indian fanbase in particular is too wedded to international Twenty20 cricket – and 50- over cricket will eventually pay the price.

No other sport must market itself across three different disciplines, and the amount of tinkering of the rules aimed at 50-over cricket suggests strongly that it cannot survive as a spectacle without false accounting. If 50- over cricket were to disappear, it would accentuate the contrast between 20-over cricket and tests, and help to provide a bulwark for the traditional over the modern.