Why we need the lousy FTP

It is best to be right for the right reasons, but we humans often fall short of that standard, in which case, I think we should be sympathetic towards those who turn out to be right, but for the wrong reasons.

Take Colonel Lamprey-Tickler-Smythe, who, in the summer of 1934, launched a disastrous pre-emptive invasion of Nazi Germany. Landing at Berlin airport with his valet Bernard and an old school chum from Eton, he took a taxi to the Reichstag, which he attempted to storm, armed only with a stout umbrella and a commanding tone.

After a brief skirmish with some elderly clerks, the colonel and his band were rounded up and promptly repatriated to Blighty, where he explained his actions to the British press. He said that he'd become convinced that Hitler posed a deadly threat to Europe and had to be stopped when he read in the Telegraph that the man was a vegetarian. In the Colonel's opinion, if good people stood by and did nothing, then the traditional British Sunday roast dinner would be trampled beneath the vegetarian jackboot.

I thought of the colonel this week when I read that the FICA was advocating the return of the FTP. It was right, but for the wrong reasons.

FICA suggested that the return of the FTP would help prevent another player strike, but it's hard to see how. The freedom to collectively withdraw your labour is a basic human right. Admittedly, it's easier to be sympathetic if that labour involves working 12-hour shifts at the bottom of an asbestos mine, or cleaning the outside of the International Space Station, rather than running around a field chasing a ball, but the principle remains.

People strike because they think they aren't being paid enough. And as Test cricket is losing popularity and money faster than a boy band after the launch of their second album, the smaller boards are finding it harder and harder to satisfy the pay demands of their employees. If you can earn tens of thousands for six weeks' work with the Delhi Dodos, why would you accept a fraction of that to play months of Test cricket in empty stadia?

One solution is for the boards that still run profitable Test series to see what they could do to spread the popularity of the format.

But that sounds too much like hard work. Instead of trying to find ways to increase the golden-egg output of their ageing Test goose, they prefer to keep it in a tiny cage, to which only certain people have the key, and force feed it a diet of Ashes.

The end of the FTP means a return to the days when fixtures were arranged by the Chairman of the MCC sending a telegram to his second cousin, who happened to be Governor of India/Australia/(insert name of illegally appropriated slice of planet Earth here), instructing him that Her Majesty's Cricket Club would be sending Lord somebody or other and his touring party of gentleman by the next steamboat, to be sure to lay on plenty of elephants and champagne and to get the flag the right way up this time.

That these days, it's the chairman of the BCCI sitting in the jewel-encrusted cricket throne, doesn't alter the fact that it's a lousy system.

In fact, the FTP is a bit like democracy. It is fashionable to whinge about democracy, to claim that it doesn't work, that it's a sham, and that the only way to change things is to stay at home and order Russell Brand's book. But, given a few thousand years to find a system of government, it's the least lousy we've come up with so far.

The FTP won't ensure the future of Test cricket and it won't stop players downing bat and ball mid-tour, but it does at least offer a framework on which a newly popular five-day game could be grown. As Winston Churchill would almost certainly have put it, "The FTP is the worst system of organising international cricket tours, except for all those others that have been tried from time to time."