The International Cricket Council will return to the knotty question of the World Test Championship’s future next week, with two meetings pencilled in. First comes a virtual gathering of the chief executives’ committee (CEC) on 21 May, followed by an in-person board meeting in Ahmedabad on 30-31 May, conveniently slotted around the IPL final.
Top of the agenda is a progress report from the working group chaired by former New Zealand batter Roger Twose. That panel was asked last year to look at whether the current nine-team championship could be expanded to all 12 Full Members – Zimbabwe, Ireland and Afghanistan would come in from the 2027-29 cycle – and whether one-off Tests should carry championship points.
At present each participating board schedules three home and three away series across a two-year window, with every series running to at least two Tests. The working group believes that single-match series could ease calendar pressure, create entry points for smaller nations and, crucially, still provide meaningful cricket. Twose has kept his public comments brief, though he told reporters in March, “Our job is simply to table practical options; the members will decide what’s right for them.”
Nothing will be rubber-stamped next week. The most likely outcome is that executives agree in principle on an expanded field, ask for more number-crunching on one-Test series, and aim to land on a firm model by the ICC’s annual conference in Edinburgh in July, immediately after the Women’s T20 World Cup. One official familiar with the talks said, “There’s a fair bit of goodwill, but also some nervousness about diluting marquee series.”
Any new structure must dovetail with the Future Tours Programme, which concludes with the 2027 WTC final in England. Member boards negotiate those bilateral fixtures themselves, the ICC merely signing off the finished schedule. A larger championship, or one with shorter series, would inevitably force some reshuffling – something administrators regard as both a headache and an opportunity.
The Ahmedabad meeting itself is not without sub-plots. Uncertainty lingers over whether Pakistan Cricket Board chair Mohsin Naqvi will travel, given the continuing freeze in state-level relations between India and Pakistan. A virtual appearance remains on the table.
Geoff Allardice, the ICC chief executive, reiterated last year, “The WTC has given every Test match context, and that’s good for fans and players alike.” The question now is how far the governing body can stretch that context without stretching the format too thin.
While an overhaul is hardly guaranteed, the very fact that expansion and shorter series are live proposals hints at changing attitudes. In the words of one senior administrator, “If Test cricket is to grow, we have to give everyone a fair shot at it.”
