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 unsatisfactory token Test 'series'.
Partly this is down to the promotion to Test level of the likes of Bangladesh (30 of their 35 Test series have been two games in length), Zimbabwe and to a lesser extent Sri Lanka. But not exclusively.
Tendulkar
This is where the eulogies are needed. Not to the death of Test cricket, which will bury us all, but to the demise - outside England and Australia at least - of the five-Test series.
Sachin Tendulkar has played just three five-Test series in his career. Sri Lanka have never played one. New Zealand haven't since a 0-0 draw in the Caribbean in 1972.
This is a shame. A quick look at the rare fourth and fifth Tests in recent years shows they nearly always produce a more satisfactory overall series outcome than a three-Test equivalent. The 2005 Ashes series would have been a thrilling but ultimately unsatisfying 1-1 draw; so too in 2010/11. Both series produced results more reflective of the overall play thanks to the additional games, while in 2006/7 the extra matches allowed the full extent of Australia's ruthless, clinical domination to be more accurately, painfully confirmed.
Even in 2009, when the result remained unaffected - 1-0 becoming 2-1 - who can say their Test-watching experience was the poorer for watching England's capitulation in Leeds and resurrection at The Oval rather than seeing the hosts regain the Ashes with a drab draw at a damp Edgbaston?
Even away from the Ashes, think Marcus Trescothick blitzing South Africa at The Oval in 2003, or again in the return series in 2004/5 as he and Matthew Hoggard propelled England to an astonishing Wanderers success.
English fans signing futile online petitions in protest at seeing only three-Test series next summer need not worry unduly; five of the next seven summers will see five-Test series against Australia and India while in 2016 and 2017 there are four-Test rubbers scheduled against South Africa and Pakistan.
But fans in the rest of the Test-playing world are losing out. Not every series should be four or five matches long, but Test cricket would be a better place if more teams and more players got the chance to extend themselves across the full Test course.
Maybe this is a hopeless dream. Maybe logistical and financial constraints make it impossible, with the idea of cutting a couple of ODIs to squeeze in an extra Test bringing cricket's influential moneymen out in hives. But if Tests are cricket's premier format, then the five-match series is Test cricket's premier format.
Test cricket is not dying. But it would be in even better health if five was still alive.
