A lot of active and former international cricketers have spoken against the proposal of Four-Day Tests and Australian Ricky Ponting is the latest to join the brigade.
ICC’s proposal for Tests to be considered as four-day affairs has been attacked by almost every cricketer that has spoken about it. Former Australian captain Ricky Ponting, who is the second-highest run-getter in Test cricket, is also of the opinion that there should not be any change to the traditional five-day game unless it’s badly broken.
He said, “I'm against it but I'd like to hear from the people who are pushing it what the major reason is. I know we've had a lot of four-day games the last couple of years but what I've noticed in the last decade is how many drawn Test matches there have been, and I just wonder if they had have been all four-day Test matches through that period of time would we have had more drawn games.”
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“That's one thing I don't think anybody wants to see. I understand there is a commercial side to it, saving money and things like that and how they would start on a Thursday to finish on Sunday. I'd like to hear the other reasons behind it. I don't understand it enough and I'm very much a traditionalist, so if something's not really badly broken then why do we need to fix it or change it?” he said.
A similar kind of thought was looked at by the ICC committee two to three years ago. The proposal suffered a similar fate then too and the idea was dropped. Ponting wants to keep Test cricket the way it is.
The 45-year-old said, “Let's wind the clock back two, three years ago, it was being discussed then. I know we had a vote at one of the meetings about putting a proposal forward to changing it and the overriding decision there was that we wanted to keep it as five days. Everyone will say the Test match game is badly broken because a lot of countries around the world aren't getting much attendance at the games.”
“We're certainly lucky here in Australia and England that we do get good solid crowds for the Test match games played over five days. My overall opinion is to leave it the way it is and it seems to be working pretty well at the moment,” he said.
(Source: cricket.com.au)
