Five days is good for you

	Market forces have prompted cricket's organisers to ensure India are not knocked out early in tournaments © ICC/Getty Enlarge
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Something peculiar happened to the price of cricket's TV rights in 2011: three hours of Twenty20 were now fetching the same as five days of a Test. James Sutherland, Cricket Australia's chief executive, put the figure at $7m. The market has spoken - and the implications for Test cricket are as terrifying as the sums involved.

As with the housing market before the credit crunch, the last two decades have seen an unprecedented boom. Andrew Wildblood of sports and media business IMG sold the rights to England's 1992-93 India tour for $200,000; today, he says, they would be worth around $200m. The challenges facing Test cricket are structural, says Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of media communications company WPP and an avid Test fan: "Test cricket is a game designed for a different era. The market has changed."

In one sense, then, administrators who stress Test cricket's importance are deferring to an outmoded ideal. Like their elected political counterparts struggling with economic chaos, they have been rendered powerless by the market forces they once encouraged - despite yanking wildly at supply-and-demand levers and creating policy aimed, not at winning over voters, but at desperately trying to please the markets themselves. It's all a bit Frankenstein's monster.

Compared with the commercially ferocious IPL franchise owners, for example, the ICC's efforts to sell Test cricket to the public can appear "a bit public sector", as one insider put it. Test cricket is marketed as being good for us, like fruit and veg.

But is it the administrators' fault that cricket finds itself in this situation? The career of Steve Jobs, the Walt Disney of the digital era who died last year, may have carried an unwitting message. Faced with constant clamour for newer and shinier gadgets, Jobs remained obsessive about quality. It was the products Apple didn't make, people said, that protected the company's value. As if in homage, Wildblood asks: "If Wimbledon took place three times a year, would it be worth more or less money?"

In this regard, says Tim Crow, a former ECB executive and a sports-sponsorship expert, the ICC has failed. "Sports such as tennis and golf suffer from oversupply too," he says. "But Twenty20 was supposed to create a new market for cricket, and the administrators have allowed it to cannibalise the existing one."

Sorrell believes governing bodies have chased the quick buck. "The boards are maximising short-term returns at the expense of the long term," he says. "It's very difficult to resist the temptation to exploit the commercial opportunity in front of you. But it's a very big mistake."

The money has created a series of perverse incentives. Compare, for example, the experiences of Somerset and Lancashire. The teams met in the final round of the County Championship in Taunton, where Lancashire won the title and claimed around £550,000 for six months' work. A few weeks later Somerset's players shared £320,000 for playing seven Twenty20 matches at the Champions League in India. They lost in the semi-final; the winners, Mumbai Indians, walked away with £1.6m. As Sanjay Manjrekar, the commentator and former Indian batsman, points out: "For Test cricket to survive, Rahul Dravid must earn more money playing Tests than Suresh Raina does playing T20."

Extend the logic and a radical - if fashionable - solution presents itself: a bailout for Test cricket. The team at the top of the Test rankings at the start of April 2012 received $175,000. The ICC are increasing this figure: by 2015, the No. 1 team will win $500,000. But that may be too little, too late. What would happen to the popularity of Tests were that figure $1m? Or $10m? The ICC would still need to show a level of marketing skill that has been beyond them. Instead, they responded as they usually do when faced with a problem: they created a new event. The first World Test Championship was scheduled for England in 2013, giving what ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat called "narrative" to the Test calendar.

The market had other ideas. Lorgat's plan was vetoed by ESS, whose chief executive Manu Sawhney says: "We may be seduced by the ideas of instant success in a post-IPL world, but we have to remember success is an exception rather than the rule. We have just had a successful World Cup, but that is a success story more than 30 years in the making. A World Test Championship is not going to bring immediate success, but we need to remain steadfast and committed. Cricket should be prepared to make that investment." The subtext was clear: promote Test cricket if you like - just not with our money.

Crucially, the proposed tournament came with no guarantee of India's participation, and the broadcasters were apparently protecting themselves against a repeat of the hit that shook the world of cricket rights in 2007. For it's no exaggeration to say that India's World Cup game against Bangladesh in Port-of-Spain on March 17 that year was the most influential cricket match of the last decade.

Bangladesh's shock win left India needing to beat Sri Lanka six days later to stay in the tournament. When they lost, the World Cup disappeared from the radar of advertisers and sponsors back in India. The event had been underwritten by a $550m deal - the total cost of both the 2003 and 2007 competitions - between the ICC and NewsCorp's Global Cricket Corporation. The Indian market was sold to ESS, for whom - as pan-Asian broadcasters - the team's failure was a commercial catastrophe.

Since that day, cricket's TV money has been seeking a tournament India can't lose - or at least can't be knocked out of so quickly. In this, the market has been aided by administrators happy to tinker with event structures to minimise that risk. To use banking jargon, the market has been hedging India.

It's not as if there had been no warning signs about the effects of market forces. At that same World Cup, a young boy called Faood queued in muggy heat at Georgetown's new Providence Stadium to watch West Indies v Sri Lanka on April 1. He had his bag searched by armed security guards - and a bottle of water confiscated. It was no joke: the water was a local brand, which conflicted with the sinister-sounding pouring rights of Pepsi, one of the ICC's official sponsors.

It didn't end there. Faood was wearing the maroon West Indies one-day top, complete with sponsor Digicel's logo across the chest. It was another marketing no-no: the ICC had sold the mobile phone rights to Cable & Wireless, Digicel's fierce rivals. Faood had a choice: wear the shirt inside out, or get another one. "Something's gone wrong," said his father. No one, it seemed, was listening. Or perhaps they were - and had no idea how to force the genie back in the bottle.

Richard Gillis writes the Unofficial Partner blog, and in the Wall Street Journal