Oval: The World Test Championship final between Australia and India at the Oval starts on Wednesday against a backdrop of fears for the long format given the growth of Twenty20 franchise leagues.

Not that there’s anything new about cricket-lovers worrying about the future of their sport.

Indeed it was following an 1882 Test at the Oval, after Australia had inflicted England’s first defeat on home soil, that the Sporting Times published a mock obituary of English cricket that referenced its cremation, with “the Ashes taken to Australia”.

The Ashes has since become a shorthand for Anglo-Australian Test cricket, with a five-match series in England starting next week just days after the scheduled finish of the WTC final. One current concern is that the riches on offer to leading players from T20 tournament such as the Indian Premier League, and the vastly shorter time it takes to earn the money than by playing five-day Test cricket, makes the traditional format of the game much less attractive to leading modern-day players. The International Cricket Council’s response was to devise the WTC, a two-year cycle of games culminating in a final, in order to give Test cricket greater context.

Published in The Daily National Courier, June, 07 2023

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