ICC considering change of format to revitalise Tests](Latest news & breaking headlines | The Times and The Sunday Times)
The apparently exponential growth of international cricket is at last starting to trouble the consciences of the game’s governing body. Malcolm Gray, the ICC chairman who will shortly hand the reins to Ehsan Mani, of Pakistan, made some curious comments on Saturday about Australia’s excessive domination of the game, as if it was their duty to come down to the level of everyone else, rather than the reverse. “Previously, the Australian public has loved their team playing so well and winning everything,” he said.
“However, I maintain that eventually they will tire of that.” The ICC’s duty, he added, was to promote the game in struggling Test nations and to “ensure a greater evenness within the competition”.
**He was speaking shortly after an ICC think-tank in London had mulled over the idea of a radical revision of the concept of Test series forming part of extensive tours by one country to another. In their place, although the scheme is as yet no more than a rather vague idea, would come a running World Championship that starts afresh each year and in which each country would play the others once, at home and away, thus giving each nation, in the context of the present group of ten, a total of nine Tests a year: five at home and four away one season, vice versa the next. **
Brendan McClements, the ICC’s manager of corporate affairs, emphasises that there are commercial (television) agreements in place that prevent any change to the present schedule of matches within the Test Championship for at least three years. Nonetheless, something has to be done to prevent an excess of matches generally, with the attendant evils of burning out the best players and inducing apathy in the keenest followers, and the kind of mismatches in which Bangladesh have so far been involved: 19 matches, one draw, 18 defeats, 13 of them by an innings.
A reasonable long-term solution, I believe, would be to embrace the idea of a running annual championship, dividing the nations into divisions, with promotion and relegation between the group with Test status and two or more tiers below. It would be reasonable to start by having the eight most established countries in a first division of eight. That would leave Zimbabwe and Bangladesh with a temporarily reduced status. The prospect of a single promotion each year, however, would be a powerful stimulus.
The culture of reward or punishment can have undesirable consequences in domestic sport, arguably, for example, in county cricket with the influx of overseas professionals and the creation of an Australia-like juggernaut in Surrey. Striving to be cricket’s Manchester United, they have the ambition, efficiency and resources to gobble up many of the best players and therefore give too little opportunity to their home-grown talent.
In a national context, however, where prestige is at stake, both the hope of promotion and the threat of relegation should ensure a rapid flow of funds from public and business sources towards the production of an effective national team and the necessary infrastructure to support it.
An annual championship would be extremely media-friendly and would suit the players by reducing their time away from home.
It will need a highly organised brain and a good computer to work out a feasible programme but a fresh approach is needed.