Test cricket is in rude health no? Think again

There is a southern summer of truly spectacular promise in the offing in men's Test cricket. A five-match Border-Gavaskar series, a three-Test New Zealand vs England tilt, and a South Africa vs Sri Lanka series, played entirely at the coastal (read: turning) South African venues, are already tantalising prospects.

But add to this the masala of two World Test Championship final spots being up for grabs and we're getting into World-Cup-knockouts levels of fun here.

If you're a T20 fan raised on last-over finishes every other night, please don't laugh. A several-month multi-series climax leading to a global trophy is about as great as Test fans have ever had it. For that, thanks are due to the World Test Championship. Whatever its flaws, in its third cycle at least, it has bloomed into a league in which no fewer than five teams are still in the hunt leading in to the final months.

Australia and India are top of the table. But New Zealand, Sri Lanka and South Africa are in a meaningful tussle now, with all three having racked up vital wins in the last few months, and all three due to host home series that have the potential to vault them into the final.

It would be easy, at this point, to conclude that Test cricket is actually in good health. Bangladesh recently whitewashed Pakistan. Pakistan have just beaten England at home. New Zealand have pulled off arguably their greatest Test cricket feat ever, whitewashing India in India. Earlier this year we even had West Indies beating Australia at the Gabba, which felt like a once-in-a-generation moment for West Indies cricket.

But take a peek under the hood.

Let's take South Africa first, who only ten years ago were one of the great Test outfits. Just this year they sent a vastly depleted Test squad to New Zealand because those matches clashed with the SA20 tournament. They were duly smashed. That South Africa have a chance of making the WTC final despite this is an achievement on its own. But even if they do appear at Lord's next June, they will have done so having not played a single three-Test series in this cycle.

Sri Lanka, meanwhile, for all their board's flaws, have always valued Test cricket. Their major problem is that their broadcasters tend to see Tests as such an inconvenience that home series are almost always two-Test affairs, and are increasingly played exclusively in Galle. It makes more financial sense for broadcasters to keep their rigging in place in one venue through a series, while it also makes cricketing sense for Sri Lanka Cricket to avoid giving matches to the P Saravanamuttu Oval, where the team has tended to lose in the past decade. Essentially you have a situation in which five of six home Tests in a WTC cycle will likely end up being played in Galle.

New Zealand, meanwhile, have a unique disadvantage: the sun rises too early there. Where Tests played in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa may be consumed by the India market (it matters little what cricket is watched, it only matters how valuable the advertisements consumed are - this has long been the case), tests would have to go way past midnight in New Zealand to even break into Indian prime time. New Zealand, for now, are holding their own, playing as many as two three-Test series in this cycle. But in terms of Tests, their homecoming summer will feature only the three matches against England.

Cricket West Indies, which has sustained a laudable Test programme (playing roughly eight Tests a year) over the last ten years, has almost certainly faced the greatest economic headwinds of all the WTC teams, stuck as they are in a time zone possibly even more inhospitable to South Asian audiences than New Zealand's, plus a tiny home market of their own.

Of the non-WTC nations, Zimbabwe play sporadically, Ireland barely get an invite, and Afghanistan have no serious home venue.

As the graph above shows, the Big Three nations (India, England, Australia) have played more Tests than the others through this period. Sri Lanka have been a close fourth, but this is arguably largely due to SLC's serious commitment to maintaining their Test programme. Sri Lanka is the only country that has hosted all three of Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Ireland during this period. These are all loss-making series for SLC.

If we split the WTC league into the Big Three and the Next Six (South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, West Indies), for the Next-Six boards generally, the only home series that provide serious earning opportunities are those against the Big Three. This is why three-Test series have become increasingly rare over the past two decades - boards would rather spend that time hosting limited-overs games.

The next graph makes that plain. England play the longest series, on average, but for both India and Australia, almost two thirds of their series have been three-Test (or longer) affairs. That number is less than half for every Next Six team.

The ICC's best idea so far to deal with this imbalance has been to put in place a "Test match fund", where the Big Three essentially redistribute a small percentage of their revenue to the remaining men's Test teams to subsidise those teams' Test programmes. The latest version of this whisper of a plan, which hasn't even really been discussed, features a central pot of roughly US$15 million, split between nine countries, with players being guaranteed a $10,000 match fee for Tests.

But even this has already been described as "window dressing" by some boards, with CWI's former CEO Johnny Grave, whose term ended last month, among the most vocal. "I don't know if US $15 million a year will make any difference to anything," Grave told the talkSport Following On podcast in August. "We pay our players $10,000, so I sort of smiled when that came out in the press."

In fact, split nine ways, the $15 million annual payout - which has yet to be approved - is little better than the $1.25 million a year promised to smaller boards nine years ago; it barely accounts for inflation since then. That Test match fund payout was halted very soon after it began, though at least two years worth of payments were made.

Still, for context, the ICC's present four-year broadcast deal with Star is understood to be worth $3.5 billion globally. From that sum, the BCCI, ECB and CA have carved out annual payouts worth almost $310 million put together (this works out to about 58% of the monies paid out to Full Members each year). It is true that the Next Six nations are also getting more money in nominal terms than they used to, but this being a sport, and competition being key, the vital figure is how much they are getting in comparison to other nations. The proposed Test match fund is worth less than 5% of the Big Three's income from the ICC alone (they have other sources of revenue).

If it is widely accepted that any sports league has to have some semblance of equality of opportunity about it. Equalising rules such as drafts or salary caps are imposed on many T20 leagues, but cricket has largely chosen to make peace with gargantuan imbalances in its oldest format. And if Test cricket is being allowed to wane naturally in the smaller nations, it is worth noting that many of those nations are propping up the red-ball game at considerable expense. South Africa, in particular, have felt the need to de-prioritise Test cricket in favour of their T20 league. It's worth noting here, too, that no other league enjoys the de-facto hiatus that international cricket takes for the benefit of the IPL.

We may have a delicious few months of Test cricket ahead of us, for now, thanks in no small part to an epochal New Zealand win. But it is worth asking, how long before the vast commercial disparities begin to swallow the format?