Cricket: the biggest shake-up in Test history

Everyone knows that Test cricket is in trouble, said Michael Vaughan in The Daily Telegraph. It is by far the greatest form of the sport, yet it lags behind Twenty20 cricket in popularity. But new reforms introduced by the International Cricket Council (ICC) might just arrest the decline. What the ICC is proposing amounts to a Test world championship – the first in the sport’s history. The world’s top nine sides will, over the course of two years, play six series of Tests; and at the end of that period, the top two teams in the league table will face off in a dramatic final.

This is the biggest shake-up of Test cricket since the format was created in 1877, said Tim Wigmore in The Independent. It’s not a flawless solution: ideally, all teams should face each other over the two years, but the sport’s “overcrowded schedule” makes that impossible. Yet there’s no doubt that the new competition will replace the “unfathomable” world rankings with an easily understood system; it will give Tests a sense of “narrative” and drama. These changes are certainly a step in the right direction, said Mike Atherton in The Times. But they still don’t address the biggest challenge facing Test cricket, which is the lure of T20 and its “lucrative domestic tournaments”. West Indies, for example, doesn’t allow players who skip its domestic competitions for T20 tournaments overseas to play in its Test side. And since T20 pays so well, the national side is deprived of many of its finest players. The only way to get around this is to create a competition involving all three formats: teams would have to compete against each other in Tests, one-day internationals (ODIS) and T20 matches, with the same squad for all their matches. The ensuing league table would need to reflect the duration of matches, with a Test win awarded more points than an ODI, which, in turn, is worth more than T20. Such a tournament would force selectors to choose “players who could excel across all formats”, and discourage cricketers from specialising in T20. It may meet with a lot of resistance, but unless that kind of action is taken, we will not be able to prevent the sport diverging into “two completely different games”.