Friday 13 June 2008

How to fix this mess. Part 3, subsection 9c

The issue of Tests Vs Twenty20 (and billy no mates ODI in the corner on facebook mobile) is naturally everywhere, thanks to those two greedy scroats Stanford and Modi. One massive thing that I believe would shore a lot of it up is Martin Crowe's idea of the Triple Treble which he floated in his Cowdrey lecture for moderately different reasons at the time.

  • Three tests
  • Three ODIs
  • Three T20s
This would do a whole heap of things to stabilize the game
  1. Standardising a tour - Before the IPL India were ODI mad, insisting of 7 ODI's in a tour, purely to get the money. Greedy scroats again, this time leaving an ugly and often boring series past the 5th match with potentially nothing to play for.

  2. Shortening a tour - The formal structure would reduce the number of tests played per country per season by 1, from 7 to 6. there's 9 days knocked off a tour without anything being half arsed

  3. Overall victory - Each individual match is a finite entity you can win. That's with a nice big fullstop at the end. With 3 different disciplines in equal measures you can then have a very clear winner of an entire series. Might want to do some points weighting in favour of the tests, but that's just fiddling.

  4. Stop the rot - The most important one really, in that this is it. BAM! you'll always play the same number of games each time. there's no wriggle room to say, well how about 4 T20s, 2 ODIs and 2 Tests? how about 9 T20s? Clearly not possible, meaning that whilst the longer formats do get reduced it's to a very clear position which has no reason to move any further.

  5. Prevent NZ only being given 2 Test series soon. (Here's looking at you kid)

  6. Less humiliating Ashes losses - No more 5-0 whitewashes!
Well that's one tiny tiny bit of the problem sorted. Next I'm going to recommend this whole Iraq thing would be a bit fixed if they called it iRaq instead and got Steve Jobs to promote it.

2 comments:

cdak said...

Maybe I'm stuck irrevocably in the past, but i do love the power shifts and twist one sometimes encounters in a classic 5 test series. A 3 match series is such a fleeting beast! I do think the idea of standardisation is one worth looking into though, especially with regard to the wildly varying no. of ODIs contested per series at present.

Spigot said...

I agree personally, and I think I remember Martin Crowe still advocating a 5 test ashes regardless, but it's generally about tradeoffs, and with 7 tests per season, it's never been the norm to have 5 tests anyway.