Test selection policy a threat to its credibility

Best players can opt in and out, maybe the time has come to separate first-class and limited-overs codes

Just as some of us were reflecting that India’s astonishing victory in Brisbane this week had reminded the world what a great game Test cricket is, one man whose mind clearly remains open is Jos Buttler, the England wicketkeeper.

The imminent series against India should be absorbing and thrilling: but Buttler is going to play in the Indian Premier League, and so it appears that an initial plan to rest him for two of the four Tests has now been expanded to three. If there is to be a policy of the best players opting in and out of the honour of playing for their country, that would become positively corrosive.

With the England and Wales Cricket Board short of cash after a Covid-19 summer, and it still looking far from certain how much cricket there will be in the summer to come for paying spectators, it has to allow its star players to ring the cash register where they can. But it can only be bad for team-building, for the morale of the side, for spectators and for the game itself if England’s best players are allowed to come and go from Test cricket as they please.

The selectors are presented with this problem by a board that wants a finger in every pie on the international front – Twenty20, 50-over and Tests – and picks from very much the same pool of players for them. When the best of those players make names for themselves in limited-overs cricket, a man from Rajasthan with a bottomless bank account turns up and offers to pave the streets in front of them with gold for the next two or three seasons.

No one can blame a cricketer confronting the prospect of huge earnings for choosing to take them. But it sends a torpedo through the long-rickety notion that playing Test cricket for one’s country must take precedence. Of course, from the 1950s to the 1980s, some of our best cricketers avoided tours to the subcontinent. But if it is the case that the ECB is happy to choose players to represent England only if they have not been made a better offer, it must concentrate minds at Lord’s, because the game cannot go on like this.

The time must now be approaching for the ECB to consider separating the codes of first-class (including Test) and one-day cricket. Indeed, doing so may be the only way to preserve the former and give it any credibility. No player should be prevented from just playing limited-overs cricket for England, his county, or as a mercenary for a side in India or elsewhere: but if he does, he should be made to register as a one-day player and could not alter that registration until 12 months later.

This would stop the drive towards England putting out what will increasingly come to look like a second XI in Test matches; it would ease fixture congestion and allow first-class cricket to be played other than in the margins of the season; and there would be nothing to stop players of huge talent who have tired of the one-day game (and vice versa) from bringing their experience back into championship and Test cricket, if they are better than those players already in it.

It is impossible for selectors to build a serious team if people rule themselves out of selection. Two codes may be a tough policy to implement, but England cannot tailor their selection policy to give leeway to individual players who would normally be among the best 11. No business can function like that and survive.