This brave new T20 world may spell the end for Test cricket

The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events

And so last week it seemed we had a decision, in which some – most – of the turkeys were persuaded to vote for Christmas.

Or perhaps it wasn’t quite a decision, being more (or less) advisory than the average referendum, and it may unravel rapidly when they all get home and realise what they’ve done.

Potentially, what they’ve done is put another piece in the jigsaw of doom for Test cricket.

In 2018 the English-based city franchise T20 league will join the IPL, the Big Bash and the Caribbean Premier League, to become part of the annual travelling circus of maximum-bashing short-form players.

So the big T20 tournaments will take up nearly half the year, and this must bring us dangerously close to the tipping point at which the leading white-ball players see this as their career, ignoring the plaintive cries of Test selectors.

Did the county representatives think this was what they could be voting for?

How does this fit in with enhancing the status of Test matches?

Is the offer of a central contract going to be enough when players can make more money from one canny T20 placement, let alone three or four?

Then there is the domestic input.

To run the city-based competition and continue with the existing county-based approach as well is going to mean that some players in England could find themselves playing 40 games of T20 a season (plus everything else).

County players seen as red-ball specialists could find themselves so short of work as to be redundant.

Will overseas players want to come to the county T20 league now it is clearly seen as secondbest?

Will it simply attract players who are somewhere short of their national T20 team?

Or players of the class of those who now join up as professionals with Minor County or Premier League sides?

And what will this overcrowding of the summer do to the County Championship, already damaged by the loss of the best English players to central contracts (and their release in a somewhat random manner)?

In which context I don’t understand how the ECB can prevent Jonny Bairstow from playing for Yorkshire when his contract is with Yorkshire and not with them?

So the ones who definitely won’t be playing in the new league are centrally contracted English Test players, who are not likely to be released either to counties or to city franchises.

No significant English player has yet defected to the T20 universe, but it must just be a matter of time.