The legitimacy of the World Test Championship was this week dealt a severe blow with Australia’s victory over India in the final. Throughout the civilised world, right-thinking people looked at the result and concluded that the format of the competition should probably be different somehow if this is the kind of thing we’re going to end up with.

We previously scorned the fallacy of fairness when India lost the first World Test Championship final and then-captain Virat Kohli said that in the future the World Test Championship final, “has to be a test of character over three Tests.”

This time around his successor Rohit Sharma was given the opportunity to voice similar sentiments via an in-no-way-leading question.

“In the next cycle, if it is possible, a three-match series would be ideal,” he said. “I would love that.”

SORE LOSER ROHIT WHINGES ABOUT TEST CHAMPIONSHIP was the gist of some of the resultant headlines.

But maybe a three-match final isn’t enough. Maybe Test cricket needs something even bigger.

We hereby propose the World Test Championship Final Premier League. The fixture list for this competition would comprise only World Test Championship finals.

With only one game every four years, it’ll obviously take quite a while to identify a winner. We’d say at least 40 years at a bare minimum and ideally a lot longer as the epic scope would represent an appropriate tribute to the longest format.

At the time of writing, with two games played, India are top on bonus points, followed by New Zealand.

Australia are bottom of the table and are therefore in grave danger of being relegated to white ball cricket.

A the end of each cycle, the winning nation should be awarded something significantly more threatening than the Test mace – a tank, say, or maybe some kind of manmade supervirus bioweapon.

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Steve Smith’s run-scoring apparently depends on whether he does or does not know the whereabouts of his own hands. Given Smith didn’t make it out of the foothills in India but then made a hundred in the World Test Championship final, we can only presume he happened across them again at some point while he was in Sussex.

First up, the hands thing, which we have previously revealed as being the real motivation for Smith’s elaborate pre-delivery fidgeting routine. He’s keeping tabs on them; making sure they don’t go astray.

Because according to Smith himself, he is prone to losing his hands and this can be for several months at a time. If that happens, all he can do is hunt for them.

“It’s taken me about three-and-a-half or four months to do it,” he revealed after finding them last time. “I had a big smile on my face after training the other day. I walked past Andrew McDonald and said, ‘I’ve found them again’.”

Judging by how frequently he’s metamorphosed into a batter in this most recent Test appearance, Smith has again located his hands.

Earlier in the year, we mildly ridiculed the idea that Smith playing in division two of the County Championship would be great preparation for Test cricket on the grounds that’s actually supposed to be one of that competition’s greatest failings. In our defence, when we said that, we didn’t realise that Smith had left his hands there.

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If there was one thing that was highly awful about Test cricket in the early 2000s, it was having to endure Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer opening the batting for Australia. Then they retired and how we rejoiced. Only now Test cricket is even worse because they’re still around and now they’re audible.

Matthew Hayden’s idiosyncratic verbal stylings have been documented on this website many a time. Hayden routinely starts one sentence only to finish an entirely different one, while his ability to add superfluous words to otherwise quite straightforward utterances is quite simply unparalleled.

Justin Langer, meanwhile, has an inexplicable attachment to the word ‘elite’ that is surpassed only by his inexpliable attachment to Matthew Hayden.

The World Test Championship final currently has both these men on commentary. (It also has another member of The Platinum Club, Ricky Ponting – who proves that it is actually entirely possible to be competent at both batting and speaking.)

Our commentary highlight so far came early and from Langer. Analysing Usman Khawaja’s 10-ball duck, he questioned the opener’s decision to walk out in a long-sleeved sweater.

Sleeves restrict your movement, you see. No physical feat has ever been achieved in sleeves.

If you’d come to this game after hearing it was a showcase for Test cricket, you could be forgiven for thinking that, in this respect at least, the format would be better left unshowcased.

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“This is the best time for me to announce retirement,” said MS Dhoni shortly after winning the IPL with Chennai Super Kings and shortly before conspicuously failing to do anything of the sort. At the age of 41, Dhoni is going to try and play on for a bit. Good on him. Why not?

In our recent feature about players who finished their Test careers on a low, we pointed out that the greatest exit from high profile cricket has already been and gone, so there’s little point striving to top it. We are therefore increasingly keen to see players go out not with a bang, but with a protracted and ignominious slump.

For those who didn’t follow this year’s IPL, Dhoni is clearly still doing a job as captain and, from what little we’ve seen, his keeping up to the stumps in particular remains a case study in lightning minimalist efficiency. He’s significantly reduced his batting ambitions though, coming in at seven or eight to have a bit of a heave for a ball or two.

Where once Dhoni prided himself on ‘taking it deep‘, these days he just dives straight into the deep, makes a big splash and quite quickly gets out again. He’s basically rebranded himself as the big lad who comes in down the order and whacks a few at the end. This is no bad thing. Every team, in every format, at every level of cricket, values a big lad who comes in down the order and whacks a few at the end.

Like many big lads who come in down the order and whack a few at the end, the modus operandi is at least partly shaped by his own limitations. Dhoni has a duff knee these days. He’s not in the market for longer innings or quick singles.

“A lot depends on the body,” he said about the prospect of playing next season. “I have six-seven months to decide.”

We’d like to think he’ll play on regardless. Cracking on in the face of ever-diminishing ability is what being a senior statesman at your club is all about. Maybe next year he’ll drop down to nine and rely more heavily on the stopping-it-with-your-shins wicketkeeping move. Maybe the year after that he’ll catch the ones that go straight to him and bring back the long stop for everything else.

Don’t retire, MS. Why do people think keeping a young player out of the side is a bad thing?

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Rajasthan Royals owner Manoj Badale has told the BBC that, “We are going to have to think creatively about Test cricket if we want it to work.” This was shortly after he’d said the quiet bit out loud.

It’s easy to characterise IPL franchise owners as ravenous financial speculators with no love for the sport. Maybe some are like that, but most invested because they do actually have an interest in cricket and in most cases that interest predates the T20 format.

Like most of us, Badale sees that cricket’s high points are being rounded-off by its omnipresence. He says Test cricket remains his favourite format and suggests we can elevate it by making it, “more of an event.” We’re with him on this. We actually have a link to an old article in the sidebar of this website that reads Keep the Ashes an ‘event’.

Badale suggests playing Test cricket in a condensed period just once a year, kind of like Wimbledon. We get where he’s coming from, but this seems suboptimal. Maybe if this annual festival of five-day cricket moved from country to country, like World Cups do, that would retain the intrigue of varying conditions, but it’s hard to envisage anything other than significantly less Test cricket played by significantly fewer nations.

But the ins and outs of this particular idea could make a whole article on their own and that isn’t actually what we want to talk about today. What we want to talk about is Badale’s justification for suggesting such a thing.

“The amount of times I hear arguments like ‘Ben Stokes wants to play Test cricket’,” he said. “That is important, but what is really important is what the fans of the future want to watch and where are they going to spend their hard-earned money.”

Where are they going to spend their hard-earned money?

The interesting part of that quote is the last bit. That detail often gets lopped off or simplistically lumped in with the bit that precedes it as if they’re essentially the same thing – which they aren’t.

Let’s have an example:

England and Australia routinely spend six months or more droning on about the Ashes and then schedule five Tests in six weeks to get it over with as fast as possible.

What does that tell us?

It tells us a couple of things.

1. People really, really enjoy investing time in thinking and talking about big Test series – there is a real appetite for that
2. There is zero incentive for a cricket board to extend the span of a Test series so that people can spend more time thinking and talking about it while it’s in progress

We’ve touched on this in a smaller way before when we wrote about why ‘overnight’ is such an important part of a five-day Test match.

We love ‘overnight’. We love those lulls in action. We love the opportunity to revisit, dissect, plot and predict. The fun of a Test match doesn’t pause at stumps each day. If anything, much of the on-field action is really not much more than the basic fodder for a far more expansive and rewarding experience which then enriches whatever follows.

The cricket feeds our investment and our investment enhances the cricket. It’s a virtuous circle.

And exactly the same goes for the longer breaks between Tests. That spell between the fifth day of the first Test and the first day of the second Test is great. It’s an opportunity to recap, review, ponder and throw forward. But where you used to get over a week to sink into a series, nowadays you’ll generally only get a day or two. You don’t get much chance to read or watch long interviews in that time and there’s little opportunity for a broad conversation about what has happened and what might happen to develop, involving players, coaches, journalists and the public.

Why does that not happen? We have months and months of ‘looking ahead to the Ashes’ even while other series are going on, so there’s clearly a massive appetite to talk about it. Once the series is underway, surely there is only more to talk about? Why is there so little opportunity to do so?

Why? Because there is nothing in it for the people who organise the tours.

Where people spend their hard-earned money

The grim truth is that a one-day international that no-one talks about generates far more revenue than all the talking in the world between Test matches. Broader interest in an ODI can be next to nothing, but you can still sell tickets and put it on TV and sell ads because people will watch.

Comments on websites, conversations in the pub? No-one’s profiting from these (trust us on this). This kind of interest is not assigned a value. Enthusiasm is only measured by boards in dollars, rupees and pounds.

And that’s how decisions are made. ‘What people want’ is of course an element of this, but it is not as simple as ‘people prefer A to B’.

We’ve previously highlighted the ‘Test cricket doesn’t fit into modern life’ fallacy. It’s a common statement that is pretty much exactly wrong. Test cricket isn’t dying because it’s unsuited to modern life; it’s being allowed to die because it’s harder to monetise.

Revenue does not equate to interest. The game is shaped not by what fans want, but what can be extracted from them.

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This event looks like an absolute bloody nightmare on almost every level.

According to Rajasthan Royals, “the welcome dinner was all about cheering our RR team members for the long but fruitful road ahead.”

Shouldn’t it be about dinner?

You can’t promise people food and then not deliver food. That is cruelty beyond belief. You will immediately appreciate that truth if you’ve ever suffered the agony of ordering a takeaway that didn’t actually turn up until several hours after you expected it.

There is no joy to be had from eating greatly belated takeaway food. Your mood is already light years from where it should be and all you can hope for then is that you can successfully apply the emotional brakes. The night is already ruined. What would have made you happy can now only limit the damage.

But at least in that scenario you do actually get food and aren’t asked to do a bunch of awful stuff instead.

Of the below activities, we could maybe, at a push, briefly tolerate the first one.

The Rajasthan Royals welcome dinner included:

Pool…

Awkward small talk…

Dancing…

Mandatory public speaking…

Listening to other people who have been forced to do public speaking…

Listening to lots and lots of people who have been forced to do public speaking…

Basically everyone really…

Then more bloody dancing…

The Rajasthan Royals welcome dinner did not – as far as we can make out – include:

Dinner.

If you start following us on Twitter or Mastodon quickly enough you’ll be in time to catch us tweeting/tooting links to this very article. Maybe in the summer we’ll start posting other stuff on social media again – probably while we’re watching the Test highlights at around 11pm after we’ve had a couple of swifts.

The Impact Player substitution thing suggests that the IPL has been reduced to rehashing old ideas in its search for eye-catching innovations/gimmicks. How about being a little more creative? How about letting batters use two bats?

When we saw the shot of Ben Stokes above, we immediately thought of a court story we heard recently about a wedding near our home town which had descended into an insanely violent mass brawl.

There are two reasons why we thought of this:

1. At least nine of the men sentenced were called Stokes
2. One guy was apparently wielding two fire extinguishers as if they were nunchuks

When it comes to wielding a cricket bat (or a fire extinguisher for that matter), we’d argue that two hands are better than one. That didn’t dissuade Moeen Ali from going for a top-spin forehand against South Africa last month though.

The logical next step is to equip a second bat for extra damage. What else are you going to use that spare hand for? A shield? A torch? A spade?

We were therefore excited to see what Stokes would be able to do with two bats. Somewhat disappointingly, what he was able to do was ‘drop one of the bats behind the stumps before taking strike two-handed’.

Nevertheless, his move does at least conjure notions of a special slogging bat primed for deployment. You may or may not remember the purest example of such a bat, the Mongoose, which was occasionally used by Matthew Hayden in the 2010 IPL and far more memorably by Dwayne Smith while dressed as a cowboy.

Back in those days, batters very rarely began their innings using a Mongoose. They instead summoned it when they felt it was time to deploy the long handle (an apt phrase because that was the bat’s defining feature – less blade, more handle).

We always imagined them calling out, “Bring Forth The Mongoose,” in a booming Brian Blessed voice at such times.

The IPL starts tomorrow.

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The 2023 IPL will see the introduction of the Impact Player. This is a player outside the starting XI who can come in to bat, bowl or both – a sub in other words. We put it to you that tactical substitutions make cricket worse.

This year’s IPL starts on March 31 with the final scheduled for May 28. They announced the Impact Player thing back in December, but we didn’t report it because honestly who gives a…

How will the Impact Player rule work?

Each team will list four substitutes at the toss. They will then be allowed to use one of them as their Impact Player.

That player can be introduced at pretty much any moment in the match. As far as we can tell, just about the only thing they can’t do is come in to finish someone else’s over.

One interesting element is that the Impact Player won’t inherit the bowling allocation from the player being subbed off. That means the captain could give someone four overs and then sub them off for another bowler.

That would mean you could pick an extra batter in your starting XI, which so often seems to be the goal with these innovations.

Why does the Impact Player rule make cricket worse?

Wrong-headed extrapolation.

There’s always been this idea in cricket administration that fans want to see the best players and that the best against the best is therefore all anyone wants. There’s then this temptation to try and engineer the game to give people the best batters and the best bowlers and nothing else.

T20 cricket is already a good few steps along this road. In a 20-over game, there’s no guarantee that everyone will bat. A lot of people assume this is great even though the most exciting T20 matches are often the ones where everyone does bat.

Just the same as with a Test match, there’s a lot more jeopardy and therefore a lot more excitement when the outcome of a game rests in the hands of those least qualified to do the job.

Matches feel like a bigger deal when the best players are involved, but cricket is at its most exciting when matches that are a big deal are decided by ordinary mortals. You need both those things. Cricket’s habit of routinely throwing people of limited ability into elite sport scenarios is a large part of the reason why it is the greatest sport of all.

Tail-enders are great. Part-time bowlers are great. Trying to muddle through in one area so that you can pick a specialist in another area is great.

One of the best things about the selection of a cricket team is trying to effectively give yourself an extra batter or bowler without actually having the option of using a 12^th player.

Tactical substitutions make cricket worse.

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Australian pundits have been left with a lot of difficult questions after their team beat India on a Test pitch that turned from day one. Can a pitch be doctored or unfair when Australia win on it?

We invited two high profile Aussie cricket personalities to try and come to terms with the victory and its ramifications for future whinging (in both pre-emptive and after-the-fact forms).

To protect the men’s identities (and they are of course both men), we have assigned them dignified fake names.

Kenny Underpants: G’day you facken galah.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: G’day you flaming mongrel.

Kenny Underpants: So we beat India then.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: Yup.

Kenny Underpants: On an absolute shit-tip of a pitch.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: Nah, it was a good pitch. Not like that shit-tip they played on in Nagpur or that shit-tip they played on in Delhi. They were turning from ball one.

Kenny Underpants: This was turning from ball one.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: Ah shit. So why did this one turn out fair then?

Kenny Underpants: Ah, well those ones were doctored, weren’t they?

Great Uncle Dangleberry: Ah, that’s right. Doctored for turn. Doctored to turn from ball one. Shouldn’t be like that. Test cricket should be played on fair pitches.

Kenny Underpants: So this one probably wasn’t doctored to turn from ball one. But it did turn from ball one anyway. So…

Great Uncle Dangleberry: Uh… I guess that’s unfair?

Kenny Underpants: Yeah, er, it does still seem unfair… But the bloody Aussies won anyway!

Great Uncle Dangleberry: Yeah! Go you good thing! Put a gap in ’em!

Kenny Underpants: So basically, it was an unfair pitch, the Indians were cheating, and Australia are so good they won anyway.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: That’s about the size of it, mate. People might at this point be wondering what a fair pitch is.

Kenny Underpants: Well that’s easy, isn’t it? It’s just a normal pitch, like you get in ‘stralia.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: Yeah, if you want an idea of what a good, normal, fair pitch is, come to Oz. Nowhere else in the world consistently produces good, normal, fair pitches like we do.

Kenny Underpants: 400 in the first innings, 500 in the second innings and then, I dunno, I guess cracks and stuff. Something for the spinners. Just good, normal, fair pitches.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: With a good, normal, fair ball that doesn’t do too much.

Kenny Underpants: Good, normal, fair pitch; good, normal, fair ball; good, normal, fair cricket with the bloody Aussies sticking it to whoever they’re bloody playing.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: Reckon it’ll be a fair pitch for the World Test Championship final, mate?

Kenny Underpants: Dunno, mate. Have to wait and see. It’s in England, isn’t it? Wouldn’t have thought so then.

Great Uncle Dangleberry: They’ll be doctoring it to help India’s seamers already.

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A year ago, during the 50-over tournament, we headlined our semi-finals preview piece, Who will lose to Australia in the World Cup final? Even if it’s a different format, it’s tempting to take the same attitude now. But if there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that life isn’t an endless procession of victories. It’s more of a munge of making-the-best-of-its. Surely that fundamental truth will apply to Australia before too long?

T20 World Cup semi-finals time then. Where are we? Australia and England have won all four games so far. India have only lost to England. South Africa are also through having won two games bigly and lost two marginally.

Australia play India tomorrow. England play South Africa on Friday. (Both matches are at 1pm UK time.)

England v South Africa

If there’s cause for optimism for England, it’s that they currently boast the tournament’s top run-scorer (Nat Sciver-Brunt) and also the top wicket-taker (Sophie Ecclestone). If the latter only shares that position with Australia’s Megan Schutt and New Zealand’s Lea Tahuhu (great name) then it’s worth emphasising that her average (a comical 7.62) and economy rate (an absolutely outlandish 3.81) are superior.

This is of course just more of the same from Ecclestone, who is the top-ranked bowler in both limited overs formats and showing few signs of ever not being so. It has reached the point now where many teams are pretty much just writing off the four overs she bowls as losses and hoping they can do enough with the bat to win in the other 16. That is an incredible thing and honestly not really a very viable strategy.

Ecclestone really deserves a catchy nickname or tagline to acknowledge her consistent brilliance. ‘The Chester Jester’ references what a fun player she is, but doesn’t otherwise seem all that flattering. For now, we’re going with ‘The Cestrian Who’s the Bestrian’ because it’s exactly the mix of awkward and awful that always seems to appeal to us.

For their part, South Africa are at home, which is surely helpful. Less helpfully they’re still slightly haunted by the decision to leave out captain Dane van Niekerk because she couldn’t run 2km quickly enough.

Obviously the players will have been trying not to think about her omission during the tournament. Equally obviously, they’ll have been completely failing, because one of them – Marizanne Kapp – is van Niekerk’s wife.

Australia v India

India are in decent shape. Their only defeat was to England and it wasn’t a bad one. After initially reducing them to 29-3, they found themselves chasing 152 to win and successfully exceeded the required run-rate in the 16 non-Ecclestone overs.

It is also usually India who end Australia’s recurring winning streaks. They ended a 21-match unbeaten run in December, albeit only after a Super Over. They also ended a 26-match winning streak in one-day internationals that stretched from 2017 to 2021.

As causes for optimism go, the best you can say is that it is one.

The final’s on Sunday, by the way.

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