<\/p>\n
Wisden hits the shelves this week and, as well as unveiling its latest batch of award winners, it has trained its sights on the International Cricket Council<\/a>. The World Test Championship, the book argues, is a \u201cshambles masquerading as a showpiece\u201d.<\/p>\n The publication of the sport\u2019s annual bible is timely, with the future of the WTC discussed recently at ICC meetings in \u00adZimbabwe. In typically opaque fashion, the sport\u2019s governing body is yet to announce the outcome of the debate.<\/p>\n Sources suggest the 2025-27 WTC is likely to remain the same, with nine teams and an asymmetrical two\u2011year fixture list producing two finalists. Writing in his notes the Wisden editor, Lawrence Booth, has made the case for a four-year all\u2011play\u2011all format, highlighting South Africa\u2019s spot in the final at Lord\u2019s this summer despite a paltry diet of two-match series and having faced neither \u00adEngland nor Australia en route.<\/p>\n \u201cAmong the first items in [the ICC chair Jay] Shah\u2019s in-tray ought to be the World Test \u00adChampionship, a shambles masquerading as a \u00adshowpiece,\u201d Booth writes. \u201cThis is not South Africa\u2019s fault. It may even be to their benefit, if the path from laughing stocks to Lord\u2019s persuades their board that Test cricket is worth saving.<\/p>\n \u201cThe ICC cannot allow the championship to continue as if designed on the back of a fag packet. Double its length to four years, like football and rugby, and ensure the top nine in the rankings all play each other, home and away, over series of at least three Tests.\u201d<\/p>\n The catch, as ever, is India\u2019s ongoing refusal to\u00a0play in Pakistan on geopolitical grounds \u2013 something that came to a head during the recent Champions \u00adTrophy<\/a> when Rohit Sharma\u2019s eventual winners were based in Dubai for the entire tourna\u00adment. This in turn highlighted India\u2019s domi\u00adnance at board level, with Shah having switched from secretary of the Board of \u00adControl for Cricket in India to ICC chair last December while the issue was being debated.<\/p>\n Booth writes: \u201cThe communal shrug [that met Shah\u2019s appointment] confirmed a sorry truth: 2024 was the year cricket gave up any claim to being properly administered, with checks, balances, and governance for the many, not the few. India already had the monopoly: now they had hotels on Park Lane and Mayfair.\u201d<\/p>\n Elsewhere Wisden features moving first-person tributes to Graham Thorpe by Alec Stewart and Thorpe\u2019s wife, Amanda, with the latter keen to raise awareness and understanding of the depression and anxiety that led the former England batter to take his own life last August. \u201cSome people say suicide is selfish,\u201d Amanda Thorpe writes. \u201cBut I have so much compassion for what he went through. He didn\u2019t deserve it. No one does.\u201d<\/p>\n