ICC World Test Championship: Apex body to consider mandatory four-day Tests

The International Cricket Council (ICC) are likely to look into the matter of making four-day Tests a regularity from the World Test Championship cycle of 2023. The ICC's Cricket Committee will likely discuss the change in 2020 as there are numerous reports of increasing points of pressure in the international calendar.

The BCCI has its own demands of a huge chunk of the bilateral calendar and reasons like huge fees for hosting a Test series, etc. have contributed to the thought of hosting four-day Test games. One of the positive points about this change will be that there will be more number of Test matches that can be hosted in a series.

More than 60% of the matches being played since the beginning of 2018 have ended on or before the fourth day. If it happens then the number of overs per day will also increase from 90 to 98, thereby reducing the loss of overs.

"It is something that we have got to seriously consider," Cricket Australia chief executive Kevin Roberts told SEN Radio.

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"It is something that can't be driven by emotion, but it needs to be driven by fact. We need to look at what's the average length of Test matches over the past five-ten years in terms of time and overs. What we are committed to doing is working with all the ICC members - nobody is saying it is easy but what we are doing is looking at it holistically and we are committed to doing that," he further mentioned.

The players, on the other hand, might be against this idea since they believe that it would change the heritage on which Test cricket is built. Australian skipper Tim Paine was very vocal about his opinion on four-day Tests.

"That's the point of difference with Test cricket, it is five days, it's harder mentally, it's harder physically, and it tests players more than the four-day first-class fixtures do. I think that's what it's designed to do, so I hope it stays that way," Paine asserted.

Some fixtures like South Africa vs Zimbabwe, England vs Ireland and possibly Australia vs Afghanistan are set to be played over four days in order to slowly blood in the new idea of four-day cricket and see how it is coped up with in the international circuit.