Test cricket may not be losing its charm, it just cannot, however, its logistics have been up for debate in recent times, especially since a lot of red-ball cricket is driven by the big three – India, England and Australia. Several Test matches have ended before the fifth day itself, four being in the last month itself – two between Pakistan and England and another couple of them between India and New Zealand. With the pace of the matches fastening and pitches deteriorating increasingly quickly, the games are not going beyond the fourth day.
Hence, experts and even some former cricketers believe that the Test matches should be truncated to four days. In a poll conducted by India TV on various platforms, the results were sort of mixed with people in favour of the duration of Test matches being reduced slightly more than those who were not. 48.7 per cent out of 4,379 votes were in favour of a four-day Test while 45 per cent were the purists, not believing in any change while the rest five per cent were undecided.
Former India batter Dilip Vengsarkar opined in favour of four-day Tests saying that it will be helpful for boards outside the big three as well as the audiences, who pay for all five days at once for increasingly expensive tickets on the opening day when the match even doesn’t reach its finish point and gets done a day earlier.
“Tests should be reduced to four-day games because most of the matches are getting over in under four days. Also, most of the affiliated boards of the International Cricket Council (ICC), apart from India, Australia, and England, are not in good financial condition, so four-day Tests could save them some expenses. It is financially draining and too expensive for a team like West Indies to travel for Test matches to the rest of the world,” Vengsarkar was quoted as saying by the Times of India.
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With the World Test Championship (WTC) going on, the change might not be taken anytime soon but it is something that lawmakers might be forced to think about in the coming days and months with the sport finding itself in an existential crisis of late.
