The day the 21st football World Cup starts in Moscow, Test cricket will celebrate a landmark in Bengaluru. The format that faces existential constraints in nations where it has been played for ages, will have 12 teams under its wings from June 14. After Bangladesh became the 10th nation to join the elite fraternity in 2000, it has taken the International Cricket Council (ICC) a long time to expand further. Ireland became the 11th last month and trouble-torn Afghanistan is set to add a remarkable chapter in the game’s history when they take on India.
The timing of this move to take Test cricket to unexplored places leaves the ICC facing two challenges. Twelve is too few a number for a game aspiring for Olympic qualification. Realising this, the governing body has decided to accord official status to T20 matches featuring 104 of its member countries. This strategy is a quick fix, because there is no faster way to reach out to countries who know little of cricket and for some reason, the ICC is in a hurry to get the bat and ball into the Olympic fold by 2028. So it has to aggressively market this format. Here comes the second part. The establishment maintains it wants to preserve Test cricket and has introduced a championship in the format set to start next year. This is a difficult balancing act, considering it has not been done before.
Globalisation is a word heard often in ICC corridors in the past, but now is the time that it is actually happening. It’s a testing time for the game played over five days, for the format ICC wants to become global is different and often contradictory to the founding principles of Test cricket. Expansion is a successful venture as long as it is sustainable. Having conceded commercial ground to T20, Test cricket cannot and probably does not even expect a windfall from the markets in Afghanistan and Ireland. Unless it gets more countries from these regions, like Scotland or Nepal, the format welcoming a new member in a few days will continue to wonder where the next one comes from.
