We have seen twelve ODI World Cups since 1975, six T20 World Cups since 2007 and eight Champions Trophies since 1998. Still, what was missing was a global tournament in the purest form of the game, “TEST CRICKET“.
ICC recently announced the first edition of World Test Championship. A tournament featuring top 9 out off 12 test playing nations, each team playing a test series against 6 teams out off 8 other featuring teams in 3 home and 3 away series’ and the top two teams in the points table meeting in the grand finale at the iconic Lord’s, makes it a treasure chest full of high octane test cricket action for a course of 2 years (2019-21).
The tournament has already commenced from the 1st of August with the first Ashes Test. India are currently playing against West Indies and are all set to play against the likes of Bangladesh, England, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia in the tournament.
The tournament format is quite interesting. Rather than a traditional round robin format, where each team plays against every other team, in this tournament every team will play only against 6 other teams. These 6 teams will comprise well of top and bottom ranked teams. For instance, India do not play Pakistan and Sri Lanka, two of the lower ranked teams but they play New Zealand, South Africa, England and Australia which are in the top 5 in the rankings and Bangladesh do not play England and South Africa which are higher ranked teams but they play Sri Lanka, West Indies and Pakistan which are in the bottom 4 of the ICC Test Rankings.
Although it looks like a tough format to seep in through a layman’s mind, it definitely builds up curiosity regarding itself.
This gem of an experiment has a lot in store. 72 matches, 9 teams, 2 years and 1 heck of a tournament 🏏❤
The Shreeraj Deshmukh Blog🏏 