Imperfect World Test Championship still manages to stoke five-day fires

It's simply too late to fix this mess. Perhaps we should all just give up.

It's not the most inspiring message to send to future generations, but that is the gist of the naysaying that surrounds the World Test Championship. As with climate change, or the fate of the rhinos, so it has been with the ICC's sticking-plaster approach to the sport's oldest, most endangered format.

The flaws are manifest, and were recently excoriated from the pulpit of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, which decried this week's final as a "shambles masquerading as a showpiece".

"The ICC cannot allow the championship to continue as if designed on the back of a fag packet," Lawrence Booth, Wisden's editor, wrote, as he railed against a format in which South Africa have been the inadvertent beneficiaries of a less-is-more approach.

The fewer games a relatively strong team plays, the less chance there is of that precious points-per-Test ratio getting diluted. Hence a side that began this cycle by sending a C-Team to New Zealand, where they were duly routed in two Tests while the best players in the country stayed at home to take part in the SA20, have now marched all the way to the final off the back of seven wins in a row.

And yet, buried within that very gripe is the proof of concept that this tournament so desperately needs.

The two-Test series may well be the bane of the international schedule - too cumbersome to fit snugly into any given gap, yet too insubstantial to provide any real satisfaction to the combatants or their fans. But, as soon as it became clear in November last year - thanks to India's shock 3-0 defeat on home soil to New Zealand - that a path was opening up for South Africa to storm into the reckoning, their subsequent home series against Sri Lanka and Pakistan took on a life of their own.

This is context, is it not? A means to make the meaningless meaningful, and to drag a few otherwise uninvested bystanders along for the ride - as was unquestionably the case at Centurion in December, when South Africa flopped over the line by two wickets in what Shukri Conrad memorably declared to be a "Camel classic".

And now the game has gathered at Lord's, where the ICC's blanket branding guidelines have conferred the grand old ground with that global-event feeling, and where on Wednesday, the third staging of the World Test Championship final will take place. Rare is the major tournament that does not have a few aggrieved teams wondering what might have been as they consider their early exit. But equally rare is a final that fails to crown a worthy champion.

"I'm tired of speaking about it, to be honest," Conrad said, ahead of South Africa's training session on Monday. "We're here and that's all that matters. We get a chance to walk away as the World Test champions, playing Australia. It doesn't get any bigger than that. So, yeah, what's gone before counts for absolutely nothing at the minute."

The bells and whistles that surround the final - including a glitzy Hall of Fame induction dinner at the Beatles' former fiefdom, Abbey Road Studios - serve as a reminder that the ICC is, first and foremost, an events organiser rather than cricket's legal guardian. Notwithstanding the increasingly blurred lines in cricket's upper echelons, it can only cut its cloth according to the share of the fabric that the game is willing to allocate.

And so, not unlike the second edition of MCC's World Cricket Connects, the high-brow symposium which took place in Lord's Long Room over the preceding weekend, any attempt to gather the game's great and good is infinitely preferable to no attempt at all - even if, in both cases, the short-term output has been frustratingly impenetrable.

As Sourav Ganguly, the BCCI's president and chair of ICC Cricket Committee, put it in an official MCC release at the WCC's conclusion: "It was a lovely event, with a lot of quality people." If the same can be said of the WTC final by next Monday, it will have been a week well spent.

The difficulty for Test cricket, and its eternal quest for context, is that it remains eternally judged by its past - and that phenomenon will surely go into overdrive in 18 months' time at the game's next Big Gathering, the 150th anniversary Test that is scheduled for the MCG in March 2027.

This was also the case for England's one-off Test against Zimbabwe last week - the first such staging since James Anderson's debut series 22 years ago, and one which couldn't help but be defined by the distance (economic, as much as temporal) that has grown between the two nations in the interim.

It's a point that Conrad leant into as well, as he assessed the compromises that South Africa have been forced to reach, with both their players and the wider format, in an era of the game that is so driven by the bottom line.

"Whenever I go into the stores here, I start calculating what it costs. So it's no surprise we can't compete [economically]," he said. "So it's about prioritising certain tours, and whenever we're not playing and there's an opportunity for them to earn some US dollars, then we'll obviously encourage that.

"As long as we can plan things properly in advance, then absolutely, I've got buy-in from all of our players. They're as committed to Test cricket as they ever have been, or more committed if that's possible."

Could there have been an alternative path for the game? Hindsight suggests that the moment may have come and gone approximately a quarter of a century ago - before T20 cricket had been conceived, and when India and Pakistan were still on broad speaking terms.

Back at the turn of the Millennium, West Indies were still the sport's most recent powerhouse; Sri Lanka were still a rising force; South Africa were still in the throes of post-Apartheid release. England were beginning to get their act together after a decade of Australian Ashes dominance, but were still eminently capable of losing to all-comers.

And, for the top table's two newest teams, Zimbabwe embodied that sense that a small, well-drilled outfit with a common sense of purpose could still take the fight to one of cricket's flabbier, more distracted big beasts. As for Bangladesh, their weight of population was an extraordinary asset that was crying out for a bit of meaningful investment.

History relates that the sport chose self-interest over community development, and so we are left with this: an unsatisfactory shebang on the one hand, but - at least to judge by the first two stagings of the WTC final - a passable attempt to keep those five-day fires burning.

At the inaugural final in 2021, New Zealand's success was widely hailed as just desserts for a golden generation that had fallen inches short in a succession of white-ball campaigns. Two years later, Australia's victory (again over India) completed the set for a mighty all-formats generation, and - in Steve Smith's opinion - whet their appetite for this week's defence.

"It was great to be able to win a Test Championship final, and to be back here again and have the opportunity to defend our crown," Smith said on Monday afternoon. "Every game is important with the Test Championship on the line. That's the reason it came in, to make every Test more relevant."

The combatants themselves aren't giving up on the concept. Nor, therefore, should we.