Mark Taylor, the former captain of Australia, has come up with a new way to save Test cricket. Taylor thinks that teams should play four-day Test matches because it gives leaders “more adventurous” choices. The pitches for the Test series between Australia and India have caused a lot of anger. Since all three games were played and finished in less than two days.
India won the first two Tests, but Australia came back and won the third one. Taylor said on Wide World of Sports that cricket needs to change to fit the modern world. And that after a three-day break, teams can play Tests that last for four days.
“I think cricket should move with the times and bring in four-day Test matches. I think it just works better. Players like to have three days off between games, so four-day Test matches work. You play something like Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, or Friday to Monday, then three days off, and then you can do it all again. So, I think it works well and also puts the onus on skippers to be slightly more adventurous at times. We don’t need to see 500 runs scored every inning.”
Taylor said
The first player for New South Wales said that high-scoring Tests are never entertaining because they always end in boring ties.
Since Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum took over as captain and coach, England has tended to play games with the end result in mind. Last year, when they played a series in Pakistan, they won all three Test matches by small amounts. Even though tracks shouldn’t explode on the first day, Taylor agreed with the ICC that the Indore pitch for the India-Australia Test was not very good.
“It was very poor. I think that was a very kind conclusion drawn by the ICC. When you go to India, you expect to play on low, slow-turning pitches – that’s been the case for as long as I’ve known the game of cricket, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the way you expect to play in India. But you don’t expect the ball to go through the surface of the pitch on day one, and that’s what happened.”
Said Mark Taylor
When asked about the aggressive approach that many countries, led by England, are taking right now, Taylor said that the length of Test matches should be shortened. In addition to getting a low score, the location lost three points because the pitch was not balanced.
