‘World series’ keeps up pretence that Tests and T20 play the same sport
ICC’S new tournament is a poorly conceived marketing stunt that is doomed to failure
England are a little over a fortnight away from resuming the 140-year rivalry with Australia in Test cricket, a contest the thoughtful Australian batsman, David Warner, has likened to “war” and which he says fills him with “hatred”. No wonder, if that is the atmosphere in which Ashes series are played, one of our batsmen went home from the last tour with a mental illness and a team-mate retired after three Tests. One would not have thought the Ashes required such hyperbole to manufacture interest; but with Test cricket falling off the perch all over the world, perhaps it was felt we should take no chances.
This series opens as the International Cricket Council promises that Test cricket is to have a new lease of life, and one not reliant upon blood-curdling metaphors or the deployment of infantile unpleasantness.
Last month, it was announced that there will be a Test championship, beginning in 2019. The 12 countries with Test status will form two leagues, one of nine teams and the other of three – the new boys, Ireland and Afghanistan, and benighted Zimbabwe. The best nine will play six series over two years, three home and three away – so there will be no scope for each to play all the others. Each series will include a minimum of two Tests and maximum of five. The top two teams will then play a final to determine the world’s Test “champions” in England in 2021.
It is important to understand the thinking behind this preposterous plan. T20 is destroying first-class cricket, and the authorities know it. For reasons beyond most rational people, they have not – yet – decided to split the game into two codes, creating a dual system in which the traditional game might survive. This is even though some players now operate almost exclusively in one format or another. Eoin Morgan, England’s one-day captain, last played a first-class match in 2014, when he averaged almost 46 for Middlesex. At a time when England’s Test team struggles to find top-order batsmen, who can say that Morgan’s failure to concentrate on the long game has not harmed the Test side?
Therefore, in an attempt to preserve the fiction that Test cricket and T20 are the same sport, the ICC has engaged in a questionable public relations offensive about its dedication to the highest form of the game. Shashank Manohar, the ICC chairman, said that “fans around the world can enjoy international cricket knowing every game counts”. Mr Manohar seems unaware that, to Test cricket aficionados, every game has always counted. The same cannot be said for the overload of entirely forgettable, trivial short-form matches that the establishment now inflicts on the world, a golden goose the ICC is in the process of killing, with the England and Wales Cricket Board willingly complicit. Counties have been bribed with £1.3million a year to agree to the new city T20 matches that will start in 2020. They will be played during a Test series in late
Our game has become mainly about slogging and instant gratification. T20 is already king
July and throughout August, further accentuating the drift towards two codes. As I have noted before, T20 is killing Test cricket in other ways. It clogs up fixture lists during domestic seasons, and eats up time that could be used to play matches that might prepare players to reach Test level. Its huge financial rewards – especially on the subcontinent – tempt players to renounce Test cricket and act, effectively, as mercenaries – Morgan plays in India, Australia and the West Indies. The ICC seems to have become embarrassed about how its insatiable desire for money is lowering the quality of, and the interest in, Test cricket. Its plan to try to avoid it has been to devise its Test championship (20 years after the idea of one was first advanced). The thinking goes like this: because we cricket lovers are apparently incapable of enjoying a Test, in all its subtleties and with its shifts of fortune over five days, unless it is part of some greater competition, each match must be given a “context”. Awarding points for the results of each individual match and for each series over a two-year period supposedly provides that context and therefore makes each game “relevant”.
A two-test series will carry the same weight as a five-test one; if England beat mighty Australia in a five-match Ashes series, that would carry the same weight as their beating the crippled West Indies in two. As already mentioned, over the two-year cycle only six opponents will be played, meaning that two will not be, which hardly suggests the final ranking will be representative of the sides’ relative strengths. But most absurd of all – and driven again not so much by the desire for “context” as by the longing for the sound of the cash register – is the idea of the two teams who finish at the head of the main league playing each other for the “championship”. The victor will not necessarily be the best and most consistent team in the world. It will be the team who play best over one five-day period in an English summer. That is not “context”, it is a marketing stunt: and if the final, staged in England, were not to include England, who would watch?
It is hard to see some countries in the top nine ever drumming up the enthusiasm to fill Test grounds again. The turning point has already been passed. We should not delude ourselves it will not happen here: the fact the present touring team is described as the weakest we have sent to Australia in living memory, shows just how well the present structure of the English game is serving Test cricket. English cricket lacks a highly competitive intermediate level such as Australian grade cricket that produces almost ready-made first-class players, and which compensates for the short Sheffield Shield programme. Our cricket has become mainly about slogging and instant gratification. T20 is already king.
It is not just that potential Test players get little opportunity to learn their art; it is that no attempt is now made to engage the public with real cricket. The ICC championship will fail, too. But before that, if England are thrashed in Australia this winter, will questions start to be asked about where our Test cricket is going? Or will the authorities carry on believing their own publicity, and driving this 140-year old institution over the cliff that is fast coming closer?