With the World Test Championship put on hold, Dave Tickner looks at the "death" of the five-day game.
Test cricket is dying. This is what we're told.
It's not a new theory. For the last 50 years the end of Test cricket has been foretold with the same volume, wailing, gnashing of teeth and wrongness as the end of the world.
But they're both still with us.
The latest portent for Test cricket's demise is the ICC's decision to knock the much-trumpeted World Test Championship on the head, for four years at least.
While the reasons behind this decision could be construed as worrying the decision itself should not cause undue sorrow as the the World Test Championship, in its proposed format, was poorly thought out.
Test cricket hasn't had or needed a World Test Championship for 134 years, and shouldn't have one now just to satisfy people's insatiable desire to be told who's the best at something.
Test cricket is the pinnacle because it examines a player's ability, technique and mental fortitude over long matches, long series and in a wide variety of conditions.
The World Test Championship would have not have fulfilled these conditions with a crash-bang-wallop two-semis-and-a-final format all played in an English summer.
The World Test Championship would no more have revealed the world's best Test cricket team than the only-two-thirds-accurate European Super Cup reveals Europe's finest football team.
Meaningful
Do you want long, meaningful series where personal duels and intricate, inter-weaved storylines have time to flourish and breathe? Or do you just want more Test cricket? If it's the latter, then you really have nothing to worry about. After taking 107 years to complete the first 1,000 Test matches, the next 1,000 took a mere 27. If Test cricket truly is dying, it's certainly not slipping away quietly into the night, but is rather cavorting around and continuing to delight, enthral, infuriate and surprise us.
Because here's the thing: Test cricket is not dying; it is evolving. The Future Tours Programme has had two effects on international cricket tours: they are more frequent, and much shorter.
With financial pressure to include as many lucrative ODI and Twenty20 engagements as possible, Test series are getting squashed.
Splitting the history of Tests roughly in half, there were 217 series between 1877 and 1979/80; 108 - or almost half - of these were contested over five or more Tests.
From 1980 to the current contests between South Africa and Australia and India and West Indies there have been 384 series, just 56 of which have been contested over five or more matches. That's just 15 per cent.
And the downward trend continues, with only 14 Test series since 1999 featuring five Tests. And 11 of those featured England, who will also be involved in every five-Test series scheduled on the FTP until 2019: various Ashes engagements and home series against India in 2014 and 2018.
The last five-Test series not involving England was West Indies v India in 2002. There may never be another.
And the flipside is the emergence of the two-Test campaign (one can't call it a series). Three-match series have always been a key part of the Test calendar, and should remain so as the standard minimum length at which two sides can legitimately claim to have truly tested both their and their opponents' abilities, but the two-Test rubber is almost entirely a recent and unwelcome innovation.
Between 1900 and 1990 there were just 11 two-Test campaigns. Since then, there have been 110 of these
