Mark Butcher, a former England batsman, has expressed concerns about the game’s longest format. The 51-year-old believes that since Test cricket’s level of competition has recently declined, the World Test Championship (WTC) has done more harm than good for the sport.
Shortly after the decision to send a sub-par team to New Zealand for the forthcoming two-match Test series, Butcher made his remarks. After receiving a lot of criticism for favoring SA20 over Test cricket, Cricket South Africa released a statement outlining their financial position. Butcher isn’t content, though, thinking that the spectators were more entertained by the bilateral series than by the WTC.
“Something they’ve done to try and salvage Test match cricket, which is the World Test Championship, is one of the things that’s made this even more inevitable.” The key is to captivate both the players and supporters of the two participating nations in your bilateral series, as well as the broader audience of cricket fans. They can only be that if they are in a competitive environment. Butcher stated on the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast, “And that’s how it always was.”
Mark Butcher: This is just a capitulation.
Mark Butcher believes that the Indian Cricket Board (ICC) would devise more intelligent strategies to safeguard Test cricket, such as boosting revenue and establishing a uniform salary for all players who play the format. Still, the former cricket player called it a “surrender” and expressed disappointment that nothing of that kind transpired.
“And the places where it might have genuinely mattered, like balancing TV rights revenues and enabling nations to retain their greatest players… I have no problem with them being able to pay a universally accepted amount of money for performances in test matches and other events and letting the wealthier boards pay their players whatever they want after that. Yet this is merely a capitulation,” Mark Butcher remarked.
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