Alex Bowden – best know for his excellent blog King Cricket – made a very good point about Test pitches on the Wisden Cricketer website:

In the highly unlikely event that Test cricket pitches were consistently made a little more challenging for batsmen, maybe people would be five times as interested in each day’s play.

Of course that’s a deliberately ludicrous statement, but is it massively untrue? I do think that there is at least an outside chance that there would be a sufficient rise in interest to make up for the loss of a great many fifth days. Who needs day five? A Test never ends in a draw on any of the first four days.

I think he is right. National boards and cricket ground owners seem to have forgotten that five days for a Test match is a maximum, not a requirement.

Test cricket is better of producing more exciting matches. It such an obvious point to make that it is easily forgotten.

• Test cricket pitches should produce more results

Not anymore though, now that I added it to the list of improvements for Test cricket.