After Pat Cummins and Johnny Grave, Michael Vaughan now becomes latest to advocate windows for Test matches

After Australian cricketer Pat Cummins, former West Indies CEO Johnny Grave, former England cricketer Michael Vaughan becomes the latest to advocate the idea of having a window for Test matches. With franchise cricket eating away a chunk of the cricketing calendar the Test tours have become smaller in terms of the number of matches played and preparation time for the touring teams ahead of the series.

“I would book three one-month windows into the schedule, where there’s no franchise cricket, so Test cricket is the only show in town. Hopefully, that would persuade a few players to keep playing Test cricket rather than just sticking to franchise stuff year-round. In those windows, I’d have all the teams playing at the same time. Possibly, towards the end of a cycle, that could mean everyone playing concurrently in the same country, or on the same continent,” wrote Vaughan in his Telegraph column.

“Franchise cricket for some countries is more lucrative, more appealing than international cricket. If I went and played franchise cricket, I could probably be away for a half or a third of the amount we are for Australia,” Cummins said at the MCC World Cricket Connects 2024 at Lord’s earlier this year.

“In Australia, Test cricket is from November to January, and basically, no other cricket is going to get in the way of us playing Test cricket then. If we can have specific windows for IPL, but then also Test windows, that makes the decision-making for the players a lot easier,” Cummins added.

“I support the concept of finding Test match windows, where there are periods in the year when only Test cricket is played and we have a number of series going on in different times,” Grave echoed similar sentiments speaking to this publication earlier. “It might be a test match starting in Sydney or Wellington, then Kolkata or Dhaka followed by one starting at Lord’s or Newlands and then one starting at Kennington Oval so eight Test teams, four Test matches filling up almost the entire 24-hour clock,” Grave added.

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