ICC must improve the next World Test Championship structure or the format is done for

JAMES COYNE: The governing body have admitted the competition's inaugural edition has been a disaster but a failure to learn from those mistakes could be fatal for the five-day game

• ICC admit World Test Championship not "fit for purpose"

Full marks to Greg Barclay for fronting up and addressing a problem. I give him that.

Recent history suggests that the top figures at the ICC, while theoretically the most powerful people in world cricket, can get away with leading an almost hermitic existence.

But, within hours of being elected chairman Barclay put himself up for interview.

Barclay is a New Zealander, and a very able administrator, so he knows very well the issues his own country have had in sustaining Test cricket in a domestic market where cricket is not the No.1 sport.

And he cast doubt on the viability of the ICC World Test Championship as it currently stands.

"From an idealist’s point of view, probably it had a lot of merit but practically, I do disagree – I am not sure whether it has achieved what it intended to do.

"My personal view is let’s get through with the little bit that we can in this Covid-19, with reallocation of points and all that… Once we have done that, let’s go back to the drawing board as I am not quite sure whether it entirely fits the purpose and has achieved what it intended to after being conceptualised four to five years back.

"I think we need to look at it in context of the calendar and not put cricketers in a situation where it’s a lot worse and not going to help us. I think there would be some countries [who agree with me]."

Anyone with the patience to try to work out the points system can tell that the World Test Championship is a bit of a dog’s dinner. It’s not been helped by Covid-19, which has kyboshed a number of series and forced the ICC into changing the placings from a points to a percentage system. This leapfrogged Australia above India, to Virat Kohli’s displeasure.

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It’s hard to get a watertight points system when some countries can barely afford to play two or three-Test series; when England, India and Australia quite rightly sometimes want five; or when you can only count six series per team in the cycle rather than eight; or when India won’t play Pakistan.

But then Barclay went further.

"It is difficult for some of the Full Members as they simply can’t afford to play Test cricket.

"Test cricket has got its legacy and I am a purist but I do accept that as much as I want to keep it as it is, less and less countries are able to afford that arrangement and are able to play it. Very few countries can make it work from a financial point of view."

We all know the dire financial straits some ICC Full Members are in, and the trouble they have financing Test cricket. Though, frankly, you suspect that some of them are using the costliness of staging Test cricket as an excuse for decades of chronic misgovernance.

So the question is: does this mean the ICC are going to remodel the World Test Championship in its next phase; or does it mean they are going to scrap it? Have they admitted defeat on Test cricket as a meaningful world sport?

It’s worth remembering how we got here. People have been calling for a World Test Championship – a proper one, over and above a rankings system – since the 1990s. The central rationale is still the same: not every country is lucky enough to have bankable marquee series such as the Ashes or the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, and need a Test Championship in order to provide drive and context for the players and fans. The Victorian system of reciprocal, but slightly ad hoc, bilateral tours simply won’t wash in an age where everything has to be quantified.

The ICC first announced a World Test Championship in 2013, supposedly to replace the 50-over Champions Trophy, only for it to collapse almost immediately under the strain of TV requirements.

^{What could become of the likes of New Zealand and West as Test nations?}

David Richardson spent much of the last few years of his tenure as ICC chief executive frantically trying to push it through. Richardson came in for all kinds of criticism for being ineffectual in the face of the Big Three railroading the rest on the finances of world cricket, and the decision to cut the 50-over World Cup to 10 teams. So when he announced a World Test Championship had finally been voted through in October 2017, he looked like a man who had achieved his lasting legacy to world cricket.

I suspect even he would admit, though, that the initial points system is sub-optimal, and he would have hoped that some of the issues would be ironed out over time. The Test Championship has been glued on top of an existing and flawed schedule, that much is clear.

But ask yourself what the alternative is. Because if it’s the scrapping of the World Test Championship, we may as well kiss goodbye to Test cricket in a swathe of nations. What’s palpably obvious, particularly in these Covid times, is that, without the framework of a World Test Championship, the schedule will gear more and more towards T20I and ODI cricket. All those people who were arguing a while back that T20Is should not be played outside of T20 World Cups? Dream on.

Test cricket would be teetering on extinction in the West Indies, New Zealand, South Africa and Sri Lanka. Pakistan and Bangladesh I reserve judgement on, because they have a national obsession with cricket and the mass of playing numbers to survive.

The viability of long-term Test cricket is already in doubt in Ireland and Afghanistan, who aren’t included in this first Championship, but do play a smattering of Tests here and there. But already the ‘pathway’ to Test cricket trodden by Afghanistan and Ireland, the ICC Intercontinental Cup, has bitten the dust. The only Associate nation I can think of which might make their Test debut in the future is Nepal, and even that looks a long shot now.

I’d suggest there’s a perception among some of the world administrators that the Big Three could survive as major Test-playing nations on their own. I’d take issue with that.

"I’d wager there’s a silent majority of cricket fans who would quite like it if the white-ball formats didn’t entirely eat up Test cricket"

Sure, West Indies will dust off Kensington Oval and their other boutique venues for England’s travelling fans every few years, but what kind of a contest will those Tests be when they’re no longer playing any other teams of a similar standard?

Much the same goes for New Zealand with Mount Maunganui, South Africa with Newlands and Sri Lanka with Galle. If there isn’t a steady diet of Test cricket, the domestic structures in those countries will simply reflect the dominance of one-day and T20 cricket, and without overseas players, in stronger first-class systems they will gradually become less and less capable of producing Test cricketers who can cut it.

So if you want Test cricket to survive outside of a handful of countries and series on a meaningful level, the World Test Championship desperately needs to be a success. And when cricket administrators talk of ‘success’ these days they don’t really mean good cricket, wins and losses, runs and wickets. They are talking about the dollars. They need Test cricket to be an attractive proposition to the broadcasters, and less of a loss-leader in the smaller Full Member nations than it currently is. From Barclay’s comments, it doesn’t appear we are there at the moment.

It might be easier to just give up. You can argue this is just the natural course of history: the market’s way of telling us purists that Test cricket’s time is up. Clearly, there is a substantial and youngish audience out there, much of it in the subcontinent, but all over the world as well, who are quite happy to watch T20 cricket and only T20 cricket. That’s up to them.

In my trade too there is a growing group of writers – some of them very good – who, sensing the way this is all going, have firmly pinned their colours to the T20 mast, capitalising on the constant proliferation of new tournaments and the growing marketable data stream around T20.

It’s not all self-interest: T20 deserves the final coverage it is now receiving, and only an idiot would deny that white-ball cricket has been at the vanguard of so many of the game’s recent innovations. Some may even genuinely believe that T20 is better than Test cricket, but to discuss the subject so directly these days is viewed as a little crude, even passé.

^{Virat Kohli is unconvinced by the revised points system for the WTC}

Then again, I’d wager there’s a silent majority of cricket fans who would quite like it if the white-ball formats didn’t entirely eat up Test cricket. When the MCC carried out a survey with over 13,000 cricket fans in early 2019, 86 per cent said Test cricket remained their preferred format, followed by ODIs, and then domestic T20. And if you think that was an old school tie stitch-up, the ICC survey a year before showed that 70 per cent of fans supported Test cricket.

Again, it would probably be damned as antediluvian now, but part of the whole point of T20 cricket at the start was that it would pay red-ball cricket’s way. Back then there was a widespread acceptance that Test cricket was the ultimate form of the game and that lots of people in lots of countries still wanted to watch it. That, basically, some things in life are so special they are worth spending money on.

If the ICC believe we’ve categorically moved past that tipping point in most Test nations, then the ICC need to front up properly with the cricket-watching audience and explain precisely how, country by country. There used to be a Test Cricket Fund; now’s the time to start funding Test cricket again out of T20 revenues.

If not, there’ll be a day, in the not-too-distant future, when we’ll see an Anrich Nortje or a Lockie Ferguson reach the end of a four-over spell, and someone on Twitter will say how good it would have been if only there’d been the time to put some slips in or to force the batsman onto the back foot with some short stuff, or see how the spinners would soon get on when the pitch started breaking up. The commentators probably won’t say that, because they’re ordered to hype up the product by the TV companies.

Sure, T20 cricket is exhilarating and constantly evolving, but if anyone tries to claim it caters for every colour in the game’s rich tapestry, they’re either a liar, a fantasist or a fool.

Should Test cricket wither away, so will part of the game itself. Maybe some administrators don’t care about that, but plenty of us do.

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