WTC? Waste of Time Championship

Sydney Morning Herald

20 hours ago

Those who have blamed the Lord's pitch for the helter-skelter World Test Championship final might have picked the wrong target. The Australia-South Africa Test match has been played by 22 cricketers re-acquainting themselves with red balls and the concept of a game going for five days.
It's not their fault that they're not ready: a lack of readiness has been built into its design, as if the powers of international cricket want to look like they're saving the Test format while doing everything they can to undermine it. Imagine if a football World Cup final were played as a one-off, out-of-season friendly for the benefit of Jeff Bezos. Not even FIFA could screw up that badly.
None of South Africa's players had taken part in a first-class game of cricket in the past five months. One, Lungi Ngidi, last bowled a red ball in a match in August 2024. (He looked a tad rusty.) Three of the Australians had played some county cricket in England last month, but for the rest, their last first-class cricket was three to six months ago.
Rusty? Just a bit. Australian viewers might be a bit rusty too. Those who wanted to watch the game had to pinch their noses, hold their breath and submerge themselves in the swamp that is Amazon. For the Test match not to be protected by anti-siphoning laws gives a pretty good idea of how Australian regulatory and broadcasting interests rate it.
For the rights to be sold to a company with a rap sheet including (but far from limited to) tax avoidance, industrial-scale fraud, forced labour and abuses of workers on five continents, monopolistic market manipulation, invasion of privacy – okay, we got the point when Jeff Bezos lined up to kiss Donald Trump's ring – well, for a cricket fan it's like being blackmailed into buying a Tesla. Test cricket is just another Amazon product, along with rape and paedophilia guides, 'I Love Hitler' T-shirts and web services for war criminals. Millions, presumably, are trying to swing a free trial so as not to further enrich Bezos. Good luck trying to cancel it.
All of this asks the question: What is the WTC final anyway? Is it really a thing, or just a nice boondoggle to give Test cricket some 'context'? If its purpose is to convince the world that Test cricket matters, it's done as good a job as most of the batsmen on the opening two days.
The WTC was devised to give meaning to matches throughout a two-year cycle, although the nature of that meaning, expressed in a points table as hard to read as a Shane Warne zooter, remains all the more unclear for South Africa's presence.
Nobody believes the Proteas are one of the top two, three or even four Test teams (although at the time of writing, cricket being cricket and two-horse races being what they are, South Africa still have a chance of being world champions, at some form of cricket, at last. Maybe, maybe not. In this kind of 'Test', the whole thing could flip over in an hour.)