Test cricket is walking a tightrope warns Yorkshire CCC chair Colin Graves

Test cricket in England remains well-supported, with fans flocking to watch Ben Stokes’s team, but the picture elsewhere is gloomy.

“International cricket is at a crossroads, certainly with Test matches,” said Graves. “There’s about six countries who virtually like playing Test cricket, get supported playing Test cricket and who want to play Test cricket. We’re one of those, and everybody wants to come here and play Test cricket, fortunately for us.

“But if you go to places like the West Indies - and I’m fortunate to go there fairly regularly - it’s a different situation. I went to see West Indies play Pakistan two years ago at Bridgetown, for example. It was a Bank Holiday, the tickets were about £7 - cheap as chips - and there were about 700 people there. That’s the problem that the countries have playing Test cricket, because in a lot of countries now they lose money on Test cricket, which is why internationally it’s come to a crossroads.”

Problems with the five-day game are myriad and wide-ranging. The schedule, for a start, appears to have been designed by a committee - and a particularly bad committee at that.

There are too many games, series containing imbalanced numbers of matches, while the so-called “big three” of India, England and Australia prefer to play lucrative fixtures against themselves, exacerbating the divide between the rich and the poor.

The World Test Championship is a laughing stock and, slowly but surely, Test cricket has been squeezed, python-like, by the proliferation of T20 franchise competitions which offer more money to players.

As a fan of all formats, having been instrumental in bringing The Hundred to English cricket, Graves believes that various questions need to be addressed.

“First, how much Test cricket do we play?” he added. “Then, is the World Test Championship working? In my view, it isn’t working. It’s a bloody mess, to be honest, the World Test Championship. They want to scrap that.

“But they also need to look at who wants to play, is it meaningful cricket and how many matches do you play?

"Fortunately, we still sell grounds out here, but Australia only sells grounds out when we go; they don’t even sell grounds out when India go, and that is alarming.

“But the viewing of Test cricket all around the world - apart from the UK - is going the wrong way, and broadcasters won’t pay high money if you’ve not got good content.

"You’ve only got to look at the South Africa-New Zealand series around Christmas-time.

"It was virtually South Africa B against New Zealand B, because the best players from those countries were playing in white-ball tournaments around the world.

"So, Test cricket’s got a big question mark against it, in terms of what it looks like going forward and how it fits in.”

Graves thinks county cricket must come into the wider conversation.

Its structure is always under the microscope anyway – more so, in fact, since the introduction of The Hundred, which Graves believes vital to the game’s finances.

“Love or hate the Hundred, the Hundred, I always said, would be the biggest asset in the English game – and it is,” said Graves.

“Already, the Hundred is worth somewhere in the region of £800m to the game. That is huge.

“County cricket is important, and there is nobody who is more of a firm believer in it than me, but do you want to be playing county cricket in early April on a bog, for example?

"We’ve got to look at when we play it, how we play it, who is playing who, and so on.”

Graves went on: “One of Andrew Strauss’s views - and this was my view - is that we should have three divisions of six, so you play less cricket but you play better quality cricket, and you play it at the right time.

“It’s not about volume; if we’re just doing it on volume alone, county cricket loses money - even Surrey. That’s fact.

"We all accept that, and we all know it, but it’s the feeder of our Test players, so we need county cricket.

"It’s important and it develops our players.

“But don’t get taken down the road of quantity rather than quality, because just saying that we want 14 Championship matches and then you don’t play because of the weather… we’re better off playing it at the right time.

“So, all of those discussions are needed of what it looks like, how it feels, and so on.

"We should talk to the players and hear what they say. What do we want for the good of county cricket going forward? That’s the big debate.”