Test championship is just too little too late

Steve Smith bats in the nets ahead of the opening match of the World Test Championship. Picture: PA

A wise television producer of my acquaintance had a clear message for anyone in production who wanted to put some information to air. If the viewer could not understand a graphic within 10 seconds, given the short amount of time between deliveries, then it was a bad graphic. What, I wonder, would he think of the World Test Championship (WTC)?

Monday morning was spent — for your benefit, you understand — getting my head around the WTC, which begins this week at Edgbaston at the same time as the Ashes. The opening Ashes Test is the first of 71 matches between the top nine Test nations, played over a two-year period, culminating in a grand finale, probably at Lord’s in June 2021. Put in a simple graphic like that, it would have a chance of going to air. Sadly, the devil is in the detail.

Let’s take a step back first and chart an ambition long in the making. Throughout its history, Test cricket has always embraced change but the pace of that change has stepped up recently as the game fights its corner in a soundbite age, where attention spans are shorter and competition for that attention is intense. Such has been the rationale for day-night Tests and four-day Tests, for example.

Despite that, there has been a longstanding fear that a random Future Tours Program, where nations play each other in Tests seemingly on a whim, lacks context and meaning. What, for example, was England’s one-off Test against Ireland, coming as it did a week after the World Cup final, all about? The Ashes needs no added context, but what about when England play in Sri Lanka next March or at home to Pakistan next August? What do these matches or series really mean? Is it enough, in this day and age, to hope that Test cricket can survive and prosper through the inherent interest created within each match and series?

As long ago as the mid-1990s, the Wisden editor at the time, Matthew Engel, proposed a World Test Championship to allay fears of lack of meaning and context. In 2008, consultants from Boston Consulting Group worked out of Cricket Australia’s offices to propose a Test championship over a four-year cycle, with television revenues pooled. Unsurprisingly, this pooling brought resistance from India and England, the wealthiest nations, and those seeds fell on stony ground.

However, the advent of the Indian Premier League that same year, with the potential for a talent drain, especially among smaller countries, provided further impetus for an overarching structure for Test cricket, and Martin Crowe, the late New Zealand batsman, was the next to come up with a format. Gradually, the germ of his idea took hold, even though the implementation, after widespread consensus, was abandoned in 2013 and 2017.

Now, finally, 10 years after Crowe’s ideas were discussed, we have lift-off. How does it work? The top nine Test-playing nations by ranking, not including therefore Ireland, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe (who have been temporarily kicked out of international cricket in any case), will each play six series, three home and three away, over the next two years, after which the top two teams will play off in a final. Then the two-year cycle begins again. It allows for the crowning of a champion Test team, something Steve Waugh, the former Australia captain, said on Monday that he regretted did not exist when he played in the best Test team during a decade-long period from 1995.

Having the chance to lift a trophy, he felt, would have validated that team’s success. The complications are clear. Not everyone plays everyone else and not every series is part of the WTC, only those so designated. Furthermore, not every series is the same length. Some series are five matches (the Ashes), some are two (England play Sri Lanka next March as part of the WTC).

Each series that is designated as part of the WTC carries 120 points, with those points divided according to the length of the series. So, a five-match series will be played for 24 points per game (for a win). A tie would produce half that amount per match, a draw a third. A two-Test series, therefore, would garner 60 points per match (for a win); 30 for a tie and 20 for a draw.

The most fundamental drawback of the system is that the WTC has been imposed on to the existing framework and schedule, not the other way around. In other words, the bilateral arrangements between countries (which underpin the finances of the game) carry precedence and there was no desire to start again afresh. Initially, those of us in favour of the WTC saw the chance to overhaul a random program but, clearly, financial imperatives have stymied that hope. England, India and Australia want to play each other more frequently, not less.

So, countries continue to choose their opponents, around which the WTC has been artificially constructed. England, for example, will play 22 Tests as part of the WTC in 2019-21 (five against Australia; five against India; four against South Africa; two against Sri Lanka, three against West Indies and three against Pakistan). There will be no matches against New Zealand or Bangladesh.

New Zealand, though, play 14 matches over the same span, for the same points (two against Sri Lanka, three against Australia; two against India; two against Bangladesh; three against West Indies and two against Pakistan). They do not play against South Africa or England. Every team’s schedule is different: Pakistan and Sri Lanka play 13 Tests in that time.

The drawbacks with the proposal are not hard to find. It is incredibly complex to explain and understand. There is no guarantee that the best team will end up on top of the pile. Over a two-year period, the personnel will change in any case, sometimes considerably.

After a World Cup in which the beauty was the fairness of everyone playing everyone else to produce a champion, we now have a system where that does not happen.

It seems odd that a five-match Ashes series carries the same value as a two-match series between New Zealand and Bangladesh. Furthermore, it seems strange that a competition based on series between countries is decided by a one-off match. The same points for a home and away win could increase the pressure on groundsmen to produce pitches suited to the home team, thus exacerbating the present imbalance that home advantage brings. And so on.

Against that, it could be argued that it will reduce the chances of dead-rubber matches carrying no interest at all. It is hoped that a neutral will be encouraged to have an interest in a remote series that does not involve his or her team. It is to be hoped a final will provide a marquee event for Test cricket, in the way a World Cup final does for the 50-over game. Football’s Nations League is a similar concept that has helped to give added context to previously meaningless “friendlies” between countries.

While accepting that finding a structure to please all is probably impossible, it is unlikely that the WTC, as proposed, will radically alter very much at all. It cannot do any harm, but Test cricket will continue to be challenged, not principally by a lack of quality — Test cricket in the past two years has been, on the whole, fascinating — but by the squeeze the shorter formats of the game puts on schedules and the warping of incentives that results. This feels too little, too late, in response, and an opportunity missed.

The Times