Here’s how we can make the World Test Championship matter

The flaws in the current tournament are obvious. Not every team plays every other and two teams – India and Pakistan – won’t play one another at all. The scoring system is calculated as the percentage of available points a team have won.

This means that teams, such as South Africa, who have looked to play short series against the weaker sides – West Indies (away), Bangladesh (away), Sri Lanka (home) and Pakistan (home) – have an obvious advantage. South Africa’s route to the final did not go through a single Test against either England or Australia. With 69.44% of the available points, South Africa have made it here to Lord’s.

The WTC should shift from being a complicated league with a final that seems to come out of nowhere. Test cricket needs a World Cup like the one-day game and the T20 format. This was, in fact, the original idea. In 2010, Haroon Lorgat, then the chief executive of the International Cricket Council (ICC) suggested the four best-ranked nations should play a Test tournament every four years.

The format was supposed to be a long league stage involving the 10 nations that at the time had Test status, culminating in semi-finals and then a final.

That form of the idea fell foul of the financial travails of the ICC and, rather than revive it, they should now go further. The World Cup of Test cricket needs to come round every four years like a World Cup in football.

The complex league system, which spans two years and passes almost entirely unnoticed, should be abandoned. World Cup matches should be badged as such. Like all serious tournaments, there should be a qualifying phase first. This would be a league format, staged over the first three years after the last World Cup. The top four ranked Test nations would qualify for the World Cup automatically.

The qualifying league would have eight teams, who would be the Test nations ranked five to nine plus Ireland, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe, who are members of the ICC but not participants in the WTC. The top four in this league would qualify for the World Cup.

Then we would set up for a festival of cricket, all hosted in one nation. There would be four quarter-finals, all played simultaneously and all played to a conclusion, although six days would suffice. Four days’ rest and then two semi-finals. Then a week off before the final.

The whole World Cup would be eight teams playing seven Test matches and it would all be done in under a month.

Clearly, this can be done only if time is found in the schedule. It is not obvious that the ICC is serious, even about its own tournament. Maybe it is not, maybe it is so in thrall to the shortest formats and the money generated by franchises that it will do nothing. But that’s not the rhetoric that surrounds the WTC. If the ICC wants to protect Test cricket, as it claims to do, it should take the WTC and turn it into a World Cup for which everything stops.

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