For England v Australia, read Mohali v Mumbai

For England v Australia, read Mohali v Mumbai

Tectonic plates are shifting in cricket. Last week the ICC made the first moves towards a smaller and shorter World Cup on the sub-continent in 2011, with 14 countries rather than 16, and an international programme spread over a longer timescale, probably six years for each country to play the others at least once at home and away, rather than five. What they should be doing is recognising reality by creating two divisions, with promotion and relegation, immediately demoting Zimbabwe and Bangladesh and creating incentives for other nations to push towards the top division.

The clearest lesson of recent events is that the “traditional” zenith of professional cricket, nation playing against nation, needs urgent protection. In the week, too, that bidding for the world's most glitzy cricketers proved that sex appeal and commercial clout count more than runs and wickets - why else would anyone bid nearly four times more for Mahendra Singh Dhoni than for Ricky Ponting? - it was clear that international cricket has to fight back.

The decision-makers of the ICC - meaning all the chief administrators of the world game - were guilty either of appeasement or of surrender when they agreed to let the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) have its way about starting the Indian Premier League (IPL) entirely on its own terms. They compounded the felony by accepting the sop of another Twenty20 tournament in October, the so-called Champions League. The alternative, without doubt, was another schism such as the one started by Kerry Packer's ambitions for televising Test cricket in the 1970s, but it might have achieved a better compromise in time than the one that now threatens the international game.

Like 1977, when World Series Cricket disrupted the Test game, 2008 will be seen by future sages as one of the most significant in the 300-year history of organised cricket. The signs are that it will mark the beginning of the end of the epoch when international matches were the main events, whatever their duration. Like it or not, England v Australia may now be on a gradual move to the edge of the stage. Its centre is likely to be occupied by Mohali against Mumbai and, within a few years no doubt, Leeds Leopards against London Lions. Welcome to the world of raw commerce and Indian control of the world game.

Pakistan is the first country to lose. Despite elections last week that defied the general expectation of violence, Australia look like getting away with a truncated tour there in April. The ICC should be applying to Australia the same penalties that it forced upon England for not playing against Zimbabwe in the 2003 World Cup, but, as usual, realpolitik has triumphed.

It is an irony indeed that there are no British players taking part in the inaugural IPL in April and May. Just as Australia and India eventually made much more out of the English “invention” of a packaged one-day game in the 1960s, so now Twenty20 is being exploited by others. A more commercially acute ECB would have applied for a patent and taken a cut with every hike on the original, but in the true British tradition, the administrators took the broader view. Good for them, although that is a moral view, not a commercial one.

There are exciting aspects to the IPL, of course, especially for the lucky few players involved. Twenty20 is still cricket, after all, and the game has always had to keep up with social trends to remain vibrant. But too much will breed contempt. The new beast can still be controlled. The primacy of international cricket, and especially of Test cricket (albeit probably played over four days rather than five), is worth fighting for.

If there can be some statesmanship and foresight in ICC circles, which includes the BCCI, it really should not be a lost cause. The best cricketers know that two-innings cricket played between nations is the ultimate test and that for satisfaction, intensity and subtlety it can never be replaced by a slogfest. A vast swath of spectators and followers, not all of them old, know that, too.

The younger ones have to be educated, which means that they deserve to be taught to play the game as well as to watch it. Relatively speaking, the BCCI has a much better record in commercially exploiting cricket than it has in nurturing the grass roots or reinvesting in facilities for players and spectators. The Wankhede Stadium in Bombay, for example, has long been a disgrace, neglected by a board that is richer by far than any of its counterparts. Now, about £1 billion wealthier still, it owes it to its booming city that the new stadium being planned is truly a state-of-the-art ground, one with some architectural merit, too, unlike the airless and graceless concrete bowls that have been put up elsewhere on the sub-continent.

The point that is in danger of being missed about the IPL is that while it may lead to a reduction in the amount of international cricket played - hence, theoretically, a slower burning out of the best players - it is certainly not going to reduce the amount of televised cricket. So overkill remains not just a danger but a positive guarantee.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/cricket/article3433470.ece