Qualifying for the final did give some context to South Africa’s Test series with Pakistan during the summer, but where is the context for the final itself? In a mace, apparently. That’s the trophy. After 2023, sometimes you would hear Australia boast of being world champions in every format of men’s cricket. Say what? Oh, that’s right, they beat India at Lord’s in a game that even India struggled to remember.
Then there’s the location. It’s in London, which would make it a home match for England if they were ever in it, but they’re not, so it’s appropriately neutral. But if it was at the home of cricket, it would be played in Mumbai, or at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. Maybe that’s its destination, though it has to be admitted that Lord’s functions better than Ahmedabad as the showcase for a museum curio. Nobody knows quite where else to put it.
Storm clouds brewing over the World Test Championship.Credit: Getty Images
So how will WTC finals, if they last, be written into history? In his excellent newly-released Test Cricket: A History, cricket writer Tim Wigmore details the ‘dizzying’ number of ‘failed plans’ for a World Test Championship in the past decade. Versions of a WTC were rejected in 2008, postponed in 2013, cancelled in 2017, and finally set in train in 2019, albeit ‘beset by compromises’ and a ‘complex points system’. “For many in England,” Wigmore writes, “the concept seems futile”. The 2021 final was won by New Zealand, a fact that I had clean forgotten. Sorry, New Zealand. Wigmore notes that the 2023 final, featuring India, was “the most-watched Test of all time”. Amazon’s match this week will not, safe to day, make the same claim.
Maybe it’s just curmudgeonly – yes, okay, it’s curmudgeonly – to ask if the WTC final is anything more than just a chunk of content to make Bezos some dough that he doesn’t need and probably doesn’t know about. Wigmore’s view is that you’ve got to give the administrators some points for trying (though it’s unclear how those points are calculated). The unspoken irony in this conclusion is that Wigmore’s history bulges with 150 years of grand Test matches that didn’t need ‘context’ bestowed upon them. They created their own context.
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It is commonly agreed, in speeches anyway, that the powers in international cricket want to face down the threat to the Test match format. Instead, the WTC only amplifies that threat. The absence of any meaningful warm-ups for the final serves to underscore how little attention the match has been paid. The Amazon deal sends its own message, from behind its paywall. The stars of both teams have spent the past two months playing in the Indian Premier League, and the fact that they can turn around and perform in whites a few days later testifies to how talented those players are, not to the importance of Test cricket.
By the closing stages of the game, the players look warmed up. They look as if they’re just about ready to play a World Test Championship final.
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