Toss talk dominating lead-up to Future Tours announcement

Not so long ago, all the talk was of the need to trim tests by one day.

Notice how that idea has fallen silent in recent months? There was a significant appetite for it. Big names, such as Mark Taylor, Shane Warne and Greg Chappell, were backing it to, at the least, be seriously considered.

But now it’s all about the toss. To toss or not to toss, that is the question and timed to coincide with the impending arrival of the world test championship late next year.

In fact, there’s talk the Ashes series in England is being lined up as the first to implement that idea.

The International Cricket Council, still finalising details of the Future Tours Programme — which will incorporate the nine-nation championship — is to discuss the idea at a meeting in Mumbai next month.

The crux of it is to try and give visiting teams a fairer shake and discourage the home team from producing pitches which are skewed too far in their favour.

One question worth considering is whether the toss has an inordinate impact on what follows. Take New Zealand’s case.

They have played 426 tests. They have won the toss 212 times, or in 49.7 percent of their matches. And when they’ve won the toss, they have lost 40 percent of tests, and won 23. When the toss has been lost, New Zealand have also lost 40 percent of tests and won 20. Big difference, no?

Ergo, an argument can be made that the toss has often been irrelevant. But tell that to the truckload of players who have turned up in India and found dustbowls and the opposition with four spinners in the line-up; or go to Headingley for a test in May to be greeted by a bright green, damp pitch and salivating seamers.

The idea is it would give the visiting team a chance to bowl first, possibly trimming the home team’s advantage. Several high profile cricket identities have called for doing away with the toss, including Ricky Ponting, Ian Botham, Shane Warne and Steve Waugh.

In England, they have given visiting county captains the option to field first in a bid to cut down the number of green, seamer-friendly surfaces, which were promoting medium pace bowling, hindering spinners and not replicating test conditions.

New Zealand seamer Matt Henry is piling up wickets for Kent, easily leading the list of county wicket takers. He is yet to see a toss made in four matches. He’s not a fan, and prefers a toss, partly because that’s always been the way and why change it?

Winning tests away from home has always been hard, and so it should be. Having no toss sounds like the start of an attempt at a sanitisation operation.

Australia have lost just four of their past

43 home series, three to South Africa and one to England; India have lost three of their past 31 at home since 2000, with a success each for Australia, England and South Africa; England have only lost two home series since 2009, to South Africa and Sri Lanka.

But these are the places teams want to win. New Zealand’s victory at Mumbai in

1988 prompted serious celebrations; ditto the win at Johannesburg in 1994, before things went badly off the rails. And you can only imagine the delight at beating India and Pakistan on their 1969 tour, the first series drawn, the second won.

But it sounds gimmicky. That said, if the outcome is reducing the number of more outlandish examples of pitch un-preparation — much as the DRS was designed to eliminate the true umpiring clanger, only to have been consistently abused by players worldwide — then why not give it a trial?