By Shailesh Kapoor
In August 2019, the long-attempted ICC initiative of holding a World Test Cricket Championship finally took off. The two-year-long event, to be played over 27 bilateral Test series over a period of 19 months, will culminate in a finale Test at Lord’s on June 10-14, 2021, leading to crowning of the first-ever Test cricket champions.
ICC’s attempts to hold a similar championship in the past were unsuccessful. The underlying complexities related to format and scheduling were too many to handle. But with some planning this time, ICC has managed to come up with a format that’s both feasible to execute and logically sound. One could quibble over elements of the format and how it falls short of symmetry, giving some teams an advantage over others. But in an elaborate tournament of this nature, this aspect is likely to be balanced out, and one should see the best two Test-playing nations compete in June 2021.
The Test Championship is a purposeful attempt to bring some interest back into a highly-revered but increasingly-niche variant of the sport. The Test format, in which a match extends over a potential 30 hours of play spread over five days, is not aligned to evident media consumption trends across the world, whereby shorter attention spans and instant gratification have emerged as key expectations. Test cricket is laborious to watch for even the most diehard T20 viewers, and has virtually no traction in the sub-30 audience.
Yet, there’s a connoisseur segment that exists, filling up the stadia for the more coveted games, like those in the Ashes, and enjoying the format for its sheer charm, and for the ebbs and flows that an ODI or a T20 game can rarely match. But the connoisseur segment is miniscule in size, and TV ratings worldwide don’t deal with connoisseurs of anything, let alone Test cricket.
Yes, there’s a Test match once in a while that ignites the excitement in a wider audience, such as the enthralling third Test in the current Ashes series, which Ben Stokes won for the English team through a heroic batting effort on the fourth day, chasing down an unlikely total in the fourth innings.
But most Test matches do not offer that level of excitement to extend the format’s appeal beyond its core connoisseur base. By introducing a Championship, ICC may have excited the connoisseurs even more, and probably brought in some fence-sitters. But it’s too early to analyse if the idea will increase ticket sales and ratings. The points system is not the easiest to crack either, unless you are a connoisseur, and that can act as an additional barrier in the first edition in particular. But at any rate, the championship cannot worsen ticket sales and ratings, and hence, is a good initiative nevertheless.
What Test cricket needs is a business model that does not depend much on TV ratings. It is evident that the format will have to survive in the long run without TV ratings supporting it. Constant efforts to boost viewership can only be frustrating. If, instead, the focus shifted to finding more innovative revenue streams (and this could vary for different host countries), the debate around the imminent danger to the format may end after all.