Category Archives: Test cricket in 2020

Harbhajan Singh makes a good point about Test pitches

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Harbhajan Singh made an excellent point about Test pitches needing to produce results. The Indian offspinner commented on the lifeless Test match against Sri Lanka at Colombo. A staggering 1402 runs were scored for a mere 17 wickets on a pitch that offered no assistance for the bowlers.

Harbhajan told Hindustan Times that such lifeless pitches brought nothing to Test cricket, “not even spectators”.

“You just can’t have one-sided contests where the batsmen dominate,” he said. “The seamers run in and bowl their hearts out and get nothing out of it. There should be some purchase on the first two days. Later on, if the spinners bowl well, they should get bounce, if not turn.

People say Test cricket is dying. It is because of such one-sided contests. If you look at series in Australia and England, they get a lot of results because they produce good wickets, wickets that are true. That’s the way it should be everywhere.

via Cricinfo.com.

It is basically the same point Alex Bowden made earlier this week, but it is such a good one that I am happy to post it again and again.

One more step to make Test cricket better

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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.

Promotion and relegation in Test cricket, and setting up the divisions

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I you are a regular visitor, you probably read one of my posts on how Test cricket should look in 2020. And I am not done yet. ;)

Today, a short post as an addendum on The case for a second division in Test cricket in which I want focus on two things:

  1. Promotion and relegation
  2. Setting up the divisions

Promotion and relegation

So why does Test cricket need divisions and promotion/relegation play-offs? Because it brings something extra to the game. Being on top in the rankings doesn’t account for anything real now, nor does being at the bottom.

But if there is a chance on promotion, teams in the lower divisions will have an actual price to play for. Being the best in your division will actually amount to something. It gives teams a real goal to focus on.

Likewise for teams at the bottom of their division, if with a slightly different motivation.

It will make Test cricket all the more interesting.

And what’s in it for the team topping the first division? Well, it just so happens the ICC already thought about that: a Test championship tournament between the top four of the division.

Setting up the divisions

In 5 Steps to make Test cricket better I claimed it was easy to set up three divisions with Full and the Top Associate/Affiliate Members  based on the current rankings. It is, and the result looks great:

Division 1

  1. India
  2. South Africa
  3. Australia
  4. Sri Lanka
  5. England
  6. Pakistan

Division 2

  1. New Zealand
  2. West Indies
  3. Bangladesh
  4. Zimbabwe
  5. Ireland

Division 3

  1. Kenya
  2. Netherlands
  3. Afghanistan
  4. Scotland
  5. Canada

Three competitions that would have some great games and create quite a bit of excitement, don’t you think? :)

Stop elitism and let more countries play Test cricket

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One of my suggested 5 steps to make Test cricket better is to give more games Test status. In this post more on why I think this would be good for Test cricket.

Lets start with some questions: Why not let Ireland play Bangladesh in a five-day game and call it a Test? Or when the Netherlands play Kenya?

Bangladesh, why do they deserve to be one of the Test-playing nations? What makes a country a Test-playing one?

And why will Zimbabwe regain Test status in 2011 after being stripped of it in 2004? Has Zimbabwe improved beyond recognition recently and returned to their playing level of the 1990′s?

Are both Bangladesh or Zimbabwe currently that much better than Ireland?

A bunch of questions and if you ask me, there are no clear answers. Test cricket seems to be more about the power inside the ICC  (Full Members have a bigger say in matters than Associate and Affiliate Members) then concerns about the quality of cricket being played.  If not, why is Zimbabwe restored to Test status?

To be clear: I am not saying “promote more countries to Full Members” (that would probably be to much for the power-hungry national boards anyway), just let them play Test cricket.

The five-day game is the biggest challenge for cricketers. Letting Associate Members play Test matches  means more players will experience this challenge and they will become better players by doing so. And if these players get better, it will be good for cricket in general.

Combined with a multi-tier competition structure having more Test-playing nations will give Test cricket a huge boost.

The game matters, traditions do not

So why not just let the Associate Members play five-day games and not call it Tests? Because that would be silly.

A international game of cricket played over five days is a Test match. It is that simple. There really is no good reason to differentiate between matches played by Full Members and Associate Members.

No, not even because of tradition. I am all for traditions, but not when they are holding back countries, players and cricket in general to develop.

Eoin Morgan and Ed Joyce choose England because they wanted to play Test cricket, not because they felt really English all of a sudden of wanted to play for a Full Member. Had Ireland been able to play Tests against the Associates Members and occasionally a Full Member they would not have switched allegiance.

Ask yourselves this last question: who is the winner in the current system? Cricket certainly is not.

Share your thoughts on how to make Test cricket better

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Last week I posted 5 steps to make Test cricket better. I will be posting more on the topic, but am also looking to learn from you.

What are your thoughts on how to make Test cricket better?

Post your ideas in the comments or add one at the special Uservoice forum. You can also just vote on one of the ideas, just click on the link below.

Join the conversation!

The case for a second division in Test cricket

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Two days ago, I posted 5 steps to make Test cricket better. In today’s post, I want go a little deeper into the first suggestion: have the current Full Members (who have Test status) and the top Associate Members with Afghanistan (officially an Affiliate Member) play in a multi-tier competition structure. A second – and third division – for Test cricket.

In my view, ‘minor’ Test-playing nations Zimbabwe and Bangladesh are better of playing and competing against sides of similar quality then being trashed by top-sides as Australia or India.

I know there are upsets every now and again, but they are just that, upsets. More often than not due to their opponents playing well under their best.

Generally speaking, Bangladesh are out of their league at Test-level.

Bangladesh versus the best Associate Members are a complete different matter as last weeks results show. Ireland beat them at Belfast five days ago and yesterday Bangladesh lost to an impressive Holland.

Off course Bangladesh will win most games against this opposition, but even when winning they are more competitive in these games than when losing to the top Test-playing countries.

And you learn more and faster in a competitive environment. The progress made by some of the Associate Members – who thanks to the ICC’s High Performance Program have played more cricket against each other in the last years – is prove of that.

Bangladesh and Zimbabwe will benefit from playing more games against Ireland, Scotland, Afghanistan, Kenya and the Netherlands, for who, in turn, the tougher challenge of playing Bangladesh and Zimbabwe regularly helps closing the gap between them and the Full Members even more.

And having a second and third division also means having play-offs for promotion and relegation. But since I am planning to write a series of posts about this subject, more on that later. ;)