The future of Test cricket has been a key point of debate in recent times. Several cricket pundits and even the players have expressed their concerns over what the purest cricket format's future holds in its fate. Recently, Australian great Steve Waugh lashed out at ICC and top cricket boards to introduce a regulation fee for Test matches.
His comments came after South Africa announced a new-look squad Test squad for the New Zealand series which featured seven uncapped players and an uncapped captain too. Now former England batter Mark Butcher has called ICC for not being able to focus on 'relevant' things to secure Test cricket. He also claimed that the World Test Championship has made things worse for the future of the format.
"One of the things that's made this even more inevitable is something that they've done to try to salvage Test match cricket, which is the World Test Championship. The point is that your bilateral series have to capture the imagination of the fans and the players of the two countries that are playing in it, and then the wider cricket-watching public. And the only way they are that is if they are competitive. And that's how it always was," Butcher said on the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast.
"Test match series were and Test matches in and of themselves, single games, were important events. The idea that you widen the whole thing out to sort of span three years and blah blah blah, some series are worth this, some series are worth that, some teams can't be asked this week – it makes it even more nebulous. The only effort that's been made to kind of try and keep it relevant, I think, has made it worse," he added.
Butcher echoed Waugh's call for levelling the Test match fee for the players and also stated that the revenues for the TV rights should have gone up. I don't know, in all of the wrong places the effort has been made.
And the places where it might actually have made a difference, i.e., levelling up revenues for TV rights, allowing countries to be able to keep hold of their best players.
"Allowing them to be able to pay a universal standard of money for Test match appearances and whatever and then allow the richer boards to pay their players whatever they want to on top of that – I have no issue with any of that stuff. But this is just a surrender, if you ask me. It's been a slow-moving car crash up to now and now it's kind of like, bang – impact has been made,"
