But if the pattern of pricing continues for Test matches in this way when teams who are not India or Australia are playing, there will be serious commercial trouble ahead. Ben Stokes, the England captain, realises this. He told Telegraph Sport this month to “just make it a bit cheaper for people to come and watch. Pretty easy solution in my eyes”. Of course it isn’t just the price of a ticket. If a parent wants to bring a child (at £40-£50 a time to a Test), plus travel from the home counties, you are probably looking at a £250 day out before the drinks and sandwiches. MCC as a club is obsessed with promoting diversity and inclusivity. If only top-rate taxpayers can afford to pay for the spectacle, such ambitions, or pretensions, fly out of the window.
We saw in the two Test series this summer – apart from the game at the Oval, when England seemed to decide to give up taking the match seriously – just how corrosive a lack of competitiveness is to the idea of Test cricket as the highest form of the game. Even if Australia or India are touring every two years, in the years when neither of them is there is the prospect of two poor sides coming to take on England in deeply one-sided matches.
It would help, of course, if some of the players who tour had played some first-class cricket within recent memory, but that now is seldom the case. Instead of playing several warm-up matches against some decent county sides, the players come straight off the plane from whichever T20 franchise they have been amusing the public in, and try to play serious five-day cricket. No wonder the results are so pitiful. So if the ECB wishes to preside over the sort of pricing structure that currently exists, it had better do something to the nature of tours that means England’s opposition are not complete turkeys, and that anything beyond the end of the second day of a Test is hardly worth paying to watch. For that is what is coming down the line, as sure as night follows day, whatever the cash-crazed cricket authorities care to pretend to the contrary.
