DUBAI // In October last year, at a glitzy affair in Abu Dhabi the ICC announced the birth of the World Test Championship (WTC). Less than four months later, up the road in far less glamorous settings at their headquarters in Dubai, the ICC confirmed its death.
The WTC is a casualty of the vast structural, administrative and financial changes world cricket will undergo soon, once all full members have agreed upon a set of resolutions put forth by the boards of Australia, England and India.
It was never a popular concept, at least within various administrations, and even at the launch, the ICC chief executive David Richardson acknowledged that no format for how it would work in practice had been agreed upon (other than the top four teams being involved).
In the new proposals, the WTC is replaced by the return of the Champions Trophy as well as an eagerly-sold vision of “Meritocratic” cricket. This will potentially allow, according to one official behind the proposals, the arrival of a top associate into Test cricket.
Though a system of promotion and relegation had been mooted, it has not been finalised just yet.
“That has not been dropped, just not finalised,” the official told The National. “There will be some modification to it but in the end an associate can play Test cricket. That is one of the best reforms ever done.”
On Wednesday, Richardson tried to put a positive spin on the second demise of the WTC (the first time the idea was dropped was in 2011).
“I think we were always struggling to find a format for it that could be completed within a relatively short space of time and that would not lead to more damage than good,” Richardson said.
“In the absence of having nothing in place, the WTC was quite good for Test cricket. However, if you look at it the way the board has looked at it now, we have the ranking system which is becoming more and more prominent, more and more people are taking note of it, more teams are trying to end the year as No 1 and earn the financial prize money that goes with that. There’s prestige involved in being number one and holding the mace.”
One of the proposals in the new model is the creation of a Test Cricket fund, designed essentially to help members whose enthusiasm to play Test cricket is outweighed by the financial losses doing so entails.
The details of what the seven other full members (outside of the big three) will receive are not clear yet: in the original leaked draft report, a fund was only created if the next batch of ICC commercial rights brought in a certain amount of money.
This, Richardson said, would compensate for the loss of the WTC and its original aims, to give Test cricket more meaning and context. “[The fund] will enable countries that at the moment are playing Test series at a loss to play Test cricket,” he said.
“The Test fund will go a long way in making sure that Test cricket does not get jettisoned in favour of ODI series as is happening at the moment ... There might come a time where we are able to put in place a one-off play-off between one and two or discuss along those lines so it is not necessarily abandoned forever.”
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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