Cricket’s World Test Championship has lost its purpose

Greg Barclay, the new chair of the International Cricket Council, has suggested that the World Test Championship is unfit for purpose.

Really? You don’t say.

In other news, the Earth is round, Donald Trump is several sandwiches short of a picnic, and coronavirus is not a good thing.

All we need now is for Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, to decide that The Hundred is also unfit for purpose.

Fat chance of that happening, though.

Of course, Barclay is to be commended rather than criticised, for the folly belonged to those who dreamt up the idea in the first place.

The World Test Championship was always a flawed notion from the start, even if it came from the best of intentions.

In a nutshell, it was designed to bring context to five-day cricket, to ensure that each bilateral series had meaning beyond stand-alone games between two nations, and to produce an overall winner at the end of each two-year cycle.

With Test cricket declining in parts of the world, and with the format not paying the bills, the WTC was seen as a way of spicing up interest in an era in which white-ball cricket rules the roost.

Instead, it has proved predictably unwieldy (who on earth can follow a league that takes two years to produce a winner?), made worse by the fact that not each country plays the same number of matches, not every team plays every other team and, even more confusingly, not every series is part of the WTC.

Throw in the fact that each series carries 120 points, resulting in the anomaly of 24 points available for a win in a five-Test Ashes series compared with 60 points for a win in a two-Test series between, say, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and you start to see the problems with the WTC, which would have been more aptly called What Total Cobblers.

Perhaps the only positive is that there are less likely to be dead rubber games, although that is more than offset by the fact there is no guarantee that the best team will come out on top at the end of it all in a one-off match to determine the winner.

Factor in, too, a pesky pandemic, which has forced a mass cancellation of fixtures in the inaugural competition that started last year, and which is due to end in a Lord’s final next summer, and the concept has been about as successful as Trump’s claims of election fraud.

Indeed, it was only a few days ago that, due to Covid-19, the ICC announced there would be a mid-tournament change to the way in which points are calculated, with win percentage, as opposed to total points, determining league placing due to the number of cancelled games. This saw Australia swap places with India at the top, although those two countries remain favourites to contest the final.

Barclay, the former head of New Zealand Cricket, clearly does not like what he sees and has offered no guarantee that the competition is here to stay.

“Covid has probably highlighted some of the shortcomings we have got with the World Test Championship,” he said. “From an idealistic point of view, it probably had a lot of merit, but I do just query in a practical sense whether it’s actually achieved what it was intended to do.

“Let’s get through this next little bit, do what we can, taking into account Covid and the ability to reallocate points or whatever, but my personal view is once we’ve done that we’re probably back to the drawing board.

“I’m just not quite sure it’s entirely fit for purpose and perhaps has achieved what we might have hoped it would when it was first conceptualised four or five years ago. Like everything, it’s kind of up for grabs and we’ll have a look at it.”

Thank goodness. As Barclay said, the biggest problem with the WTC is that it simply hasn’t done what it says on the tin. Interest in Test cricket has not been regenerated, and who in all honesty has any idea how the table looks or has consulted it recently?

One of the great joys of Test cricket – and one of the annoyances with it from an administrator’s perspective – is that it already works without such context.

Test cricket stands up in its own right because, in contrast to some forms of the game that administrators can’t wait to climb into bed with, it is actually a quality product.

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