Bold move to breathe new life into Tests
Ashes mark start of World Championship aimed at revitalising long format of game, writes Tim Wigmore
In Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile, he explains the Lindy effect: the idea that the longer something has been around already, the longer it is likely to survive into the future. “Things that have been around for a long time are not ‘ageing’ like persons, but ‘ageing’ in reverse,” Taleb writes. In other words, what survives does so because it deserves to survive and – like a classic book, say – can be appreciated across generations.
The concept bodes well for Test cricket, which has spent most of its 142 years subsumed by existential angst. Its longevity owes not just to the richness of the format, but also its adaptability, in defiance of the myth that it is impervious to the world around it.
Eternal evolution is wired into Test cricket, and never has that been truer than in the 2010s. This has been the decade of day-night Tests; of four-day Tests being reintroduced; of the Decision Review System being accepted; of two new Test nations; and even of concussion substitutes being permitted.
Next week heralds perhaps the biggest change of all. In its 142-year existence, Test cricket has stubbornly remained unique among all major international sports in having no overarching structure. Bilateral fixtures have bumbled on ceaselessly, without culminating in any overall global champion. With no semblance of equity in the fixture list, even the world rankings are scarcely valid.
In place of this chaotic system, the World Test Championship launches with the first Ashes Test on Thursday, after 15 arduous years trying to get enough Full Member boards to agree. Rather than bilateral series existing for their own sake, now they will be part of a league structure, building up to crowning a world Test champion every two years.
The idea, naturally, is that this will generate more interest in Test cricket. The success of football’s Nations League – the new structure for European international fixtures introduced last year – illustrates how having matches that are part of a broader structure can encourage more people to watch.
For the first time in Test cricket, fans of one country have a direct reason to follow matches involving other teams: England’s hopes of reaching the World Test Championship final, say, could now be reliant on Australia beating India.
The International Cricket Council’s great hope is that the World Test Championship final will become a marquee event which players and fans hold in equal reverence to the World Cup final.
This will provide all nations with the chance to build a team towards a climactic moment of the sort denied to all nations bar Australia and England, thanks to the Ashes.
It is hoped that the appeal of reaching the final – the first is at Lord’s in June 2021 – will provide the best
players with more compelling reasons to play Tests.
The imperative to qualify could inject new urgency – and accountability – into bilateral series. With clearer consequences for both victory and defeat, countries should be moved to focus on peaking for all Test series, rather than merely those with the highest profile. Results such as Sri Lanka’s 3-0 whitewashing of Australia in 2016 would be less easily ignored if they stopped Australia getting to the World Test Championship final.
Such lofty ambitions are asking for rather a lot from the first World Test Championship, a format in which insiders can too readily identify the flaws. The championship has essentially been devised from preexisting fixture agreements between countries – which explains why, though it features nine teams, they play only six of their opponents, in series of anywhere between two and five Tests. The lack of semi-finals is considered regrettable: it deprives the championship of two marquee matches of high stakes.
Without either semi-finals or a system of relegation, the tournament will change little for those Test teams who have little chance of making the top two. And there is no precedent for an international league taking 22 months to complete, like the World Test Championship.
“It makes no sense” that it takes two years to arrive at a winner, says a senior insider in cricket broadcasting. Test cricket “needs a redesign, it doesn’t need incremental changes”, he asserts. A two-year league will mean that “for 95 per cent of the time, as far as a viewer is concerned, nothing has changed. The bilateral format doesn’t exist at the same scale in any other sport”.
Even with greater context to games, an uptick of a couple of per cent in overall viewing for the format – or, perhaps more realistically, just maintaining its position – would represent a good result.
This will not change the economic reality that, unless the game involves one of Australia, England or India, it is common for boards to lose a net of £400,000 per Test they host.
Similar concerns about the Test Championship are also held by Tony Irish, the head of FICA, the sport’s global players’ association. He says that it represents “a step in the right direction” but “does not go far enough”, worrying that the disjointed structure risks being “confusing for players and fans”.
Irish also supports the ICC introducing a minimum wage for Test cricket, a proposal endorsed by Jason Holder, the West Indies captain.
“More has to be done to incentivise player retention in international cricket, and particularly Test cricket, around the world, especially in the smaller countries.” The retirement this week of Mohammad Amir from Test cricket, aged only 27, only served to emphasise the point.
For all the issues that remain unresolved, there is broad agreement that the World Test Championship marks a modest improvement on the status quo.
The optimistic view is that the championship will mark a first draft of a new structure for the Test game, rather than the final iteration, with tweaks to feature semi-finals, two divisions or more teams all possible in the years ahead.
But none of this obscures that, when Joe Root and Tim Paine line up to toss at Edgbaston, they will be launching not just another Ashes series, but also another stage in the bigger story of Test cricket’s constant evolution.