Mark Butcher: The World Test Championship has made Test cricket worse

South Africa recently announced a weakened squad for their Test tour of New Zealand. With most of their first-choice players contractually bound to appear in the second season of the SA20, South Africa’s domestic franchise T20 league, South Africa were forced to name as many as seven uncapped players in the 14-man squad for the two-Test series.

The squad announcement led to severe and widespread reactions regarding the demise of Test cricket with many prominent voices raising concerns and offering potential solutions to save the longest and oldest format of the game.

Former Australia skipper Steve Waugh made a social media post where he called the South Africa squad announcement a “defining moment in the death of Test cricket”.

Butcher also weighed in on the debate. He said that while this has been a long time coming, the concept of the World Test Championship has only made matters worse.

“One of the things that’s made this even more inevitable is something that they’ve done to try to salvage Test match cricket, which is the World Test Championship,” Butcher said on the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast.

“The point is that your bilateral series have to capture the imagination of the fans and the players of the two countries that are playing in it, and then the wider cricket watching public. And the only way they are that is if they are competitive. And that’s how it always was.

“Test match series were and Test matches in and of themselves, single games, were important events. The idea that you widen the whole thing out to sort of span three years and blah blah blah, some series are worth this, some series are worth that, some teams can’t be asked this week – it makes it even more nebulous. The only effort that’s been made to kind of try and keep it relevant, I think, has made it worse.”

Butcher suggested that instead of focusing efforts on the formation and execution of an event like the World Test Championship, the powers that be could have focused on more relevant issues which could have proved beneficial in the long run for Test cricket.

“I don’t know, in all of the wrong places the effort has been made. And the places where it might actually have made a difference, i.e., levelling up revenues for TV rights, allowing countries to be able to keep hold of their best players, allowing them to be able to pay a universal standard of money for Test match appearances and whatever and then allow the richer boards to pay their players whatever they want to on top of that – I have no issue with any of that stuff. But this is just a surrender, if you ask me. It’s been a slow moving car crash up to now and now it’s kind of like, bang – impact has been made.”

South Africa’s Test series against New Zealand will start on February 4, with Neil Brand, an uncapped left-handed batting all-rounder, set to lead the tourists in the two-match series.