I grew up believing a Test series was a season within a season. It developed grudges, exposed techniques and gave a player time to fail, adjust and answer. Now India’s Test calendar increasingly feels like furniture moved aside before a party: valuable in theory, inconvenient whenever the room is needed for something louder.
The BCCI is not solely responsible for the global squeeze. The ICC’s World Test Championship operates inside an international calendar crowded with franchise leagues and bilateral obligations, while the BCCI’s fixture list reflects commitments across formats. Yet India possesses the money and audience to lead. If the richest board treats Test cricket as negotiable, poorer boards receive permission to surrender it entirely.
I am not asking the BCCI to apologise for the IPL. The league transformed player earnings, professionalised domestic ecosystems and made Indian cricket the sport’s economic centre. I watch it. I enjoy it. My objection is to the lazy suggestion that affection for Tests requires hostility to T20. A competent administrator should be able to protect both.
Two-match series are administrative surrender
A two-Test series is often a trailer sold as a film. One bad toss, one rain interruption or one freak collapse can determine the entire contest before either side has properly adapted. Three Tests should be the minimum for serious opponents. Four or five allow narratives to mature: a batter changes his guard, a bowler alters his angle, a captain discovers that the clever field from the first week has become obvious by the third.
Administrators reply that calendars are congested. Of course they are; administrators congested them. Every new event arrives as a commercial necessity, while Tests are asked to justify their existence through immediate ratings. That is like starving a restaurant of ingredients and then citing the empty tables as proof that nobody likes the cuisine.
India also needs a clearer home-season identity. Test venues should be selected for cricketing quality, attendance potential and regional rotation—not merely association politics. Spectators need dates well in advance, sensible ticketing and basic amenities. A board that can stage an IPL final as a global spectacle can surely ensure drinking water, shade and functioning entry gates for a Test crowd.
The domestic bridge is weakening
The deeper problem is not only international scheduling. Test excellence depends on first-class cricket retaining status. The domestic calendar remains substantial, but prestige and attention flow elsewhere. Ranji Trophy performances are discussed mainly when they become selection controversies. Television coverage is inconsistent, scorecards replace storytelling, and players outside fashionable franchises remain invisible.
I would ring-fence windows for the Ranji Trophy, require centrally contracted players to appear when available and make high-quality streams easy to find. Workload management is real; it must not become a phrase meaning senior players can skip red-ball cricket by default. Young batters learn little about playing the moving ball on a fifth morning by facing twelve deliveries in a televised net.
The counterargument is that audiences have voted with their time. T20 attracts more people, therefore administrators should follow demand. I find that argument economically neat and culturally shallow. Sports bodies are custodians as well as sellers. The BCCI funds junior cricket, women’s cricket and domestic competitions because a sporting ecosystem cannot be built solely around the most profitable hour.
Test cricket also supplies skills and emotional capital that shorter formats monetise. The reputation of an Indian fast bowler who wins overseas, or a batter who survives a hostile spell, carries into every advertisement and league auction. The formats are not isolated businesses. The glamour of one often borrows from the credibility of another.
Use wealth as insulation
India should use its commercial strength to make Test participation viable for opponents. Revenue sharing, tour guarantees and coordinated windows are not charity; they are investment in credible competition. Nobody benefits if India’s future consists of repeatedly playing two or three financially secure teams while the rest abandon long-form cricket.
I also want the BCCI to speak plainly about priorities. Publish a multi-year Test schedule. Commit to minimum series lengths. Explain how workloads are allocated across formats. Give fans enough notice to travel. Transparency will not solve congestion, but it will expose whether Tests are genuinely protected or merely praised at ceremonies.
I know nostalgia can become its own form of dishonesty. Old Test cricket included dull draws, uncovered inequities and painfully slow over rates. The format does not deserve survival merely because my childhood attached romance to it. It deserves survival because it remains cricket’s most complete examination: technique, endurance, adaptation and imagination under changing conditions.
The BCCI does not need another speech about tradition. It needs a calendar that proves tradition has a reservation, not a place on the waiting list.
