Vaughan says Test cricket needs 3-4 tiers
In an interview with BBC Five Live Sport on Monday, former England captain Michael Vaughan said that Test cricket needed a promotion and relegation system to give itself meaning.
“I’ve been saying for a while that you’ve got to get the better teams playing against each other more consistently because this series [Sri Lanka’s tour of England], you look at it like it’s England and Sri Lanka, but it’s like a [English] Premier League [top-tier of English football] football team playing against a Division One [England football’s second-tier] team over five weeks, continuously. It’s a mismatch.”
When asked how he would remedy the problem, Vaughan said that he would look at dividing the Test-playing nations into different tiers, with promotion and relegation to balance things out.
“I’d have promotion and relegation. Three or four [tiers]. They would each play two Tests at both home and away. So four Tests against each team and that would be twelve [in total].
Vaughan conceded that there may be times when iconic series such as the Ashes may not be played due to the system, but he said that arrangements could be made to fit in those series.
“Even if the iconic series like India-Pakistan and England-Australia aren’t in the same league, you’ve still got to go for that because England sometimes play 17 Test matches in a year. So the 12 would be guaranteed and then you’d have promotion and relegation,” Vaughan said.
“Test match cricket needs a meaning other than the Ashes. Apart from the Ashes and I guess the India-Pakistan series, which unfortunately doesn’t generally take place these days, there’s not a great deal of meaning to all these bilateral series.”
The ongoing bilateral series between England and Sri Lanka is the first time a points system is being implemented in international men’s cricket. A win in Tests is worth four points, while a win in ODIs or T20Is is worth two and the total points will be used to declare an outright series winner. However, Vaughan believes that the system still leaves much to be desired.
“Yeah, the point system has been brought in, but I didn’t hear at the end of the first Test that England have gone four points up in the series. I heard England have gone one-nil up. So that’s going to take a bit of getting used to,” he added.
Vaughan then pointed to last December’s Test series between Australia and West Indies to drive home his point about ‘garbage’ Test series.
“Until you get promotion and relegation, you’re going to have these kinds of series. Australia versus West Indies in the winter, I don’t think anyone watched that. It was garbage. It was absolute garbage, you knew exactly what the result was going to be because it was a complete mismatch."