On June 20, 2018, the ICC launched the inaugural World Test Championship, to be played out between 2019 and 2021. New Zealand won the first edition with an eight-wicket win over India in the final at Southampton.
Despite including only nine of the 12 Test-playing nations, the WTC is an excellent initiative to popularise the format. However, the idea of a multi-nation tournament was hardly new.
In the late 1990s, The Asian Cricket Council launched the Asian Test Championship, with India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The final was held on neutral territory, in Dhaka.
India backed out of the second edition, in 2001-02. BCCI President Jagmohan Dalmiya explained it as “purely an internal matter between the Government of India and the Indian Cricket Board”. The Asian Cricket Council (ACC) invited Bangladesh instead, and the tournament was not held subsequently.
But even the Asian Test Championship (ATC) was not the first ever multi-nation Test tournament. For that, we need to go way back to 1912.
The ICC was founded in 1909 by the English, Australian, and South African cricket boards. The committee also drew up a Future Touring Programme until 1916/17.
Over this cycle, Australia, England, and South Africa would tour each other twice each for bilateral series. And there would be two triangular tournaments, in England, in 1912 and 1916.
These tournaments featured nine three-day Test matches in triple round-robin league format — in other words, each team played every other team thrice. The three England-Australia Tests would also form an Ashes series.
There would be a one-shilling entry fee, and both participating boards receiving half the gate money for each Test. A both-side agreement will be needed to decide upon the umpires for every Test match. And more.
It seemed a great idea, way ahead of its time, but it backfired spectacularly. To be fair, the organisers can hardly be blamed.
What went wrong?
The Australian cricketers had been in a row with their own board. Captain Clem Hill, vice-captain Warwick Armstrong, Victor Trumper, Vernon Ransford, Hanson Carter, and ‘Tibby’ Cotter had threatened to skip the tour unless the board replaced George Crouch with Frank Laver as manager.
There were also conflicts over team selection, and things became so heated that Hill and selector Peter McAlister physically fought for twenty minutes. Hill eventually had to be restrained from throwing McAlister out of the window.
When the board stuck to Crouch as manager, all six cricketers opted out, and Australia left with a severely depleted squad. It was a dispirited lot as well, for Crouch was an unpopular manager on tour.
In turn, Crouch wrote in his report that “some of the players had conducted themselves so badly in England as to lead to the team being socially ostracised”.
What about South Africa? Already the weakest of the three sides, they arrived without their captain, Percy Sherwell. True, they had beaten England in the previous decade – but that was at home, not in England. They would not win a Test match in England before 1935.
In other words, England were the only one side playing at full strength. And even CB Fry, their forty-year-old new captain, met the selectors only once during the tournament.
Even then, the tournament might have been a success, had it not turned out to be the wettest English summer since 1766. It rained nearly twice as much as the usual summer.
Had the weather held up, the English fans might have turned up to watch neutral Test matches between a weak South African and a weakened Australian side. As things turned out, not even nine thousand made it on Whit Monday to watch the first day’s cricket.
The attendance was even less on the second day. The absentees missed out on history, for Australian leg-spinner Jimmy Matthews became the first — and till date, remains the only — cricketer to complete two hat-tricks in the same Test match.
South Africa lost to Australia, then to England, by an innings. The second Test was played on a Lord’s wicket that had been reduced to a gluepot after rain.
The third Test, England versus Australia, also at Lord’s, was expected to get some crowd. It turned out to be a drab, ill-attended draw, for it rained so much throughout the Test match that the pitch was reduced to “pure mud”.
The second round followed the same pattern. South Africa lost both matches by big margins, though during their Lord’s Test against Australia at Lord’s, George V became the first reigning monarch to watch a Test match.
Two rain-hit draws followed, in the second England-Australia Test, at Old Trafford, and in the third Australia-South Africa Test, in Trent Bridge. The latter took place during the August Bank Holidays, when the crowd typically poured in: they did not.
When cricket finally happened, at The Oval, England bowled out South Africa for 95 and 93 in a non-contest to win inside two days.
One cannot help but feel bad for the organisers: how could you fight nature?
They tried to make the most of the ninth, and final, Test — an Anglo-Australian affair at The Oval. They removed the three-day restriction: in fact, they announced that the match would be “played to a finish even if it takes a week.”
It rained yet again, this time from the first day. The match started late, and kept getting interrupted. Only an hour and a half of cricket was possible on the second day.
When the fourth innings began on the fourth day, Australia needed 310 to win the Test match.
At that point, Australia had two wins and three draws from five Tests, while England had three wins and two draws. Had they got the runs, Australia would have won the tournament.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be too tall a task on a deteriorating wicket as Australia were bowled out for 65 in 22.4 overs. The nine Tests yielded a mere £12,463 4s 2d, over half of which came from the three England-Australia Tests.
Two years later, the Great War broke out, preventing all cricket in England, including the second edition of the championship, planned for 1916.
When postwar cricket resumed, the triangular tournament was forgotten.
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