Lisa Sthalekar: The startling numbers that show four-day matches can be the antidote to fast-forward Tests

It’s time to seriously put four-day Test matches back on the table if red-ball cricket is to survive.

A pair of two-day Tests in a single series is staggering — and undeniably “bad for business,” as Cricket Australia CEO Todd Greenberg bluntly admitted after the Boxing Day Test debacle.

CA financials work on a four-year cycle. Within that cycle they will host India and England for a Test series, which are the only bi-lateral series that make money.

Yet four Tests into the Ashes and only 13 days of play out of a possible 20. Twenty days that has been promised to the fans, the broadcasters and the commercial partners.

Yikes, that’s on a year supposed to make up the deficit.

Mark Taylor, the former Australian captain and former CA board member, has been an advocate of four-day Tests for more than a decade. Taylor was pretty much a lone soldier in his opinion, apart from a few other country administrators, that the longest and purest form of the game was costing too much to run.

Since Taylor first flagged that, the game has moved at a great pace. From the period of 2019-2022, 50 per cent of Test matches went into day five, with a third of those games producing a result and 17 per cent drawn.

That number has dropped dramatically since April 2022. Since then there have been 151 Tests played and now 63 per cent of them are being decided by the end of day four. And of the games that are going into day five only 9 per cent are drawn. Those numbers are staggering.

Former England skipper and expert commentator Michael Vaughan didn’t mince his words after the fourth Ashes Test.

“I believe this era of Test cricket is a four-day product and I go past some of the modern players and they absolutely lambast me, and say it is a five-day. Well prove me wrong then, because at the minute it is a two day product and now and again we get into the third day and we’re surprised when it gets into the fourth day,” he said.

“The way that Test cricket is played it’s nowhere near a five-day product with the pitches that we are seeing, the ball seaming a little bit more and the method of play is very much geared to get on the front foot and get after it and be more aggressive.”

I don’t always agree with Vaughan, but the statistics back up his point and the way players are equipping themselves goes against the tradition of grinding the opposition down over a number of days.

If Tests were to be limited to four days there will be purists that will argue it shouldn’t even be called Test cricket. But we have to remember that Test cricket was once played on uncovered pitches. That changed in late 1960s. Test cricket used to have a rest day incorporated, normally on a Sunday, however this was faded out in the early 1990s. To go further back, there 99 timeless Test played up until 1939, while there were six-day Tests played as late as the 1970s. The length of the game has hardly been set in stone.

These changes have affected how players perform and play for a result.

The biggest change of the Test game has been introducing the pink ball day-night fixture. Yet here in Australia, especially Adelaide Oval, it has been a game changer and bringing in more fans.

If Test cricket is to survive into the modern era, then four-day Test cricket needs to be put back onto the table.

Everyone within cricket are aware of how congested the men’s international calendar is, four-day Tests will free up space and even allow players to amply time to rest, recover and prepare (the key word used throughout this series for the English).

We may even seen the fast bowlers survive an entire Test series, through we are lucky that Australia have Mitch Starc and Scott Boland who keep turning up and sending down thunderbolts.