Those who have blamed the Lord’s pitch for the helter-skelter World Test Championship final might have picked the wrong target. The Australia-South Africa Test match has been played by 22 cricketers re-acquainting themselves with red balls and the concept of a game going for five days.
It’s not their fault that they’re not ready: a lack of readiness has been built into its design, as if the powers of international cricket want to look like they’re saving the Test format while doing everything they can to undermine it. Imagine if a football World Cup final were played as a one-off, out-of-season friendly for the benefit of Jeff Bezos. Not even FIFA could screw up that badly.
None of South Africa’s players had taken part in a first-class game of cricket in the past five months. One, Lungi Ngidi, last bowled a red ball in a match in August 2024. (He looked a tad rusty.) Three of the Australians had played some county cricket in England last month, but for the rest, their last first-class cricket was three to six months ago.
Rusty? Just a bit. Australian viewers might be a bit rusty too. Those who wanted to watch the game had to pinch their noses, hold their breath and submerge themselves in the swamp that is Amazon. For the Test match not to be protected by anti-siphoning laws gives a pretty good idea of how Australian regulatory and broadcasting interests rate it.
For the rights to be sold to a company with a rap sheet including (but far from limited to) tax avoidance, industrial-scale fraud, forced labour and abuses of workers on five continents, monopolistic market manipulation, invasion of privacy – okay, we got the point when Jeff Bezos lined up to kiss Donald Trump’s ring – well, for a cricket fan it’s like being blackmailed into buying a Tesla. Test cricket is just another Amazon product, along with rape and paedophilia guides, ‘I Love Hitler’ T-shirts and web services for war criminals. Millions, presumably, are trying to swing a free trial so as not to further enrich Bezos. Good luck trying to cancel it.
All of this asks the question: What is the WTC final anyway? Is it really a thing, or just a nice boondoggle to give Test cricket some ‘context’? If its purpose is to convince the world that Test cricket matters, it’s done as good a job as most of the batsmen on the opening two days.
Car crash Test … Pat Cummins collides with Kyle Verreynne.Credit: Getty Images
The WTC was devised to give meaning to matches throughout a two-year cycle, although the nature of that meaning, expressed in a points table as hard to read as a Shane Warne zooter, remains all the more unclear for South Africa’s presence.
Nobody believes the Proteas are one of the top two, three or even four Test teams (although at the time of writing, cricket being cricket and two-horse races being what they are, South Africa still have a chance of being world champions, at some form of cricket, at last. Maybe, maybe not. In this kind of ‘Test’, the whole thing could flip over in an hour.)
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.
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.
