Australia’s six wicket defeat of India at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Sunday confirmed that Australia, as defending champions, will meet South Africa in the final of the World Test Championship (WTC) Final in London in June.
The final will be the culmination of the third two-year WTC cycle that sees nine nations compete against each other in bilateral series to earn points. The top two nations after each cycle then compete for the WTC crown in a one-off final game.
Seems straightforward, right? Well, you’d be wrong.
The problem is that during those two years, the fixtures for each team are wildly different. The paths taken by the two finalists demonstrate this perfectly. Australia will play 19 matches in total, including five each against the other two heavyweights of global cricket: England and India. South Africa, meanwhile, will have played just 12 matches in total, including just two against India and none against Australia or England.
Test cricket doesn’t need a league table, nor its own super bowl moment.
Given these different fixtures, teams are ranked based on the percentage of points they actually earn out of the total number of points they could possibly win.
Confused yet? You’re not alone. To create a league for test cricket, the International Cricket Council (ICC) have manufactured a complex way to compare apples with oranges to generate a singular climatic final.
To put it in football terms, imagine if at the last world cup Argentina played half as many games as the other finalist, France, and didn’t have to play top-ranked sides such as the Netherlands or Croatia to make the final. Arguably, that serves as a metaphor for South Africa’s route to the WTC final.
This poses two problems for the ICC. First, it undermines the credibility of its biannual showpiece event, the WTC Final, as a showdown of the two supposedly best teams. And second, it appears rankly unfair, especially to teams that play more test cricket and regularly face stronger opponents. That England have won more games than South Africa and have played both Australia and India in the last two years – but are languishing at sixth on the WTC table – speaks to this.
So, here’s another thought: test cricket doesn’t need a league table, nor its own super bowl moment. The game thrived for almost 150 years based on the simplicity of bilateral contests – and each test is a week-long festival in its own right.
An arcane game that is uniquely long and slow, invented in English villages in the 17th and 18th centuries, and that requires its participants to wear tailored bakers’ whites, Cricket (at least in its purest form) is the antithesis of modern commercialised sport.
Not everything must build up to a grand crescendo with set-piece blockbuster moments, all to crown an undisputed champion.
Cricketers, who choose the sport despite (or perhaps because of?) its cruelty and frustrations, understand better than most what Arthur Conan Doyle meant when he ascribed these words to Sherlock Holmes: “I play the game for the game’s own sake.”
Test cricket is already good, just ask anyone who has been to Melbourne, Sydney, Centurion or Cape Town in the last two weeks. It doesn’t need a grand final, especially not one so confected.
But if test cricket must have an apotheosis, then one answer might be to extend the WTC cycle to three or four years to allow every team to play each other at least once, with a best of three finals series to cap it off.
The venue for the final should also not be tied to England. The first three one-day world cups were held in England before the hosting rights were opened up to other nations. Cricket’s centre of power has long outgrown its colonial roots, so every test playing nation should have the right to host. Indeed, ICC chair Jay Shah (formerly head of the Board of Control for Cricket in India) has indicated that the council will consider different host countries for future WTC finals, reflecting the ever more powerful role of India in the game.
In the meantime, though, good luck to both teams at Lords in June.
