Players to clash with ECB over 4-day Tests

ECB keen on 2023 change but players and counties could fight it

THE ECB will face opposition from many England players and major venues if they formally endorse plans to make four-day Tests mandatory from 2023. The proposal to abandon five-days Tests in favour of four-day games featuring 98 overs per day will be considered by the ICC’s cricket committee this year, with the ECB supportive of the concept. The ECB have joined their Australian counterparts in advocating shorter Tests on the grounds of streamlining a complex fixture schedule and potentially easing player workloads. But there are concerns that making the change would simply enable more one-day and Twenty20 competitions to be shoehorned into an already bloated schedule. Tests have been played over three, four, five and six days, and there have also been ‘timeless’ games, since the

first contest between England and Australia in 1877, but all Tests were five days from 1979 to 2017, when the ICC first sanctioned four-day games.

The ECB’s support in principle for four- day Tests follows talks with the Board of Control for Cricket in India last month over creating an annual one-day tournament involving England, India, Australia and one other side.

Finding room for such an event in the current schedule is nigh-on impossible, but trimming several days off the Test calendar would help its organisation. If four- day Tests had been in operation over the existing eight-year television rights cycle between 2015 and 2023, it would have freed up 335 days on the calendar.

Tony Irish, the chief executive of the international players’ union who will start a similar role in charge of England’s Professional

Cricketers’ Association next week, expressed fears that the change could add to players’ workload by increasing the daily over-rate as well as leading to more short-form fixtures.

The five-day Test is also seen as sacrosanct by some players, who view it as a greater challenge than domestic cricket that is played over four days.

Irish said: ‘Our concern is that countries would simply plug more cricket into the time freed up.

‘If introduced, it therefore has to be part of a more coherent structure.

‘In the past, many players have been against a change to four days, but it would also be important for players to understand any benefits of time freed up. Unfortunately, with the ICC there is a history of introducing these types of changes in an unstructured way. That would need to change if there is to be any player buy-in.’

A number of England’s major Test venues are also understood to be opposed to the change and unhappy they have not been consulted by the ECB.

Many grounds, such as the Oval and Lord’s, regularly sell out the fifth day of Tests in advance each summer even with no guarantee of play, while Old Trafford and Edgbaston have also seen healthy crowds for fifth- day finishes in recent years.

Such revenue would be lost if four-day Tests were made mandatory, while there are also concerns that such a change would alter the nature of the sport, making draws far more likely. Potential for disruption caused by rain, bad light and poor over-rates would also be far greater. Hampshire chairman Rod Bransgrove, who is pushing to bring more international cricket to the Ageas Bowl in Southampton, sounded a note of caution.

‘Innovations like the Hundred have been made to try to protect long-form cricket, not to cannibalise it, so we do owe the game and need to protect it in its current format,’ he said.

‘If I was thinking of how to preserve it, I would play less to make it more important by its rarity value — and wonder if more matches might last five days if we didn’t play quite so much. Playing too much cheapens it.’