WTC has done more harm than good to Test cricket: Mark Butcher

Mark Butcher. (Photo by Tom Shaw/Getty Images for the PCA)

Former England cricketer Mark Butcher has raised his concerns regarding the longest format of the game. The 51-year-old feels that the World Test Championship (WTC) has done more harm than good to Test cricket as the competitiveness has decreased in the recent past.

Butcher’s comments came shortly after South Africa decided to send a second-string squad to New Zealand for the upcoming two-match Test series. They faced a lot of backlash for preferring SA20 over Test cricket but Cricket South Africa issued a statement clarifying their financial standpoint. Butcher, however, isn’t happy as he believes that the fans enjoyed bilateral series more than WTC.

“One of the things that’s made this even more inevitable is something that they’ve done to try to salvage Test match cricket, which is the World Test Championship. The point is that your bilateral series have to capture the imagination of the fans and the players of the two countries that are playing in it, and then the wider cricket watching public. And the only way they are that is if they are competitive. And that’s how it always was,” Butcher said on the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast.

This is just a surrender: Mark Butcher

Butcher expects the ICC to come up with better ideas to protect Test cricket, like increasing the revenue and coming up with a universal standard pay for all the cricketers playing Test cricket. However, nothing of that sort happened, which has disappointed the former cricketer as he termed it a “surrender”.

“And the places where it might actually have made a difference, i.e., levelling up revenues for TV rights, allowing countries to be able to keep hold of their best players… Allowing them to be able to pay a universal standard of money for Test match appearances and whatever and then allow the richer boards to pay their players whatever they want to on top of that I have no issue with any of that stuff. But this is just a surrender,” Butcher said.