Test cricket's worthy of a bail-out

Twenty20 cricket, with its huge financial enticement, is coming to the West Indies in a few weeks' time.

The date is set for November 1 and the location for the drives and pulls is Antigua. But who are going to be the real stars for this blockbuster cricket match which is offering a prize purse of US$20 million? What is this Stanford 20/20 winner-take-all bonanza really about?

There can be no player development in a three-hour exhibition match. This is really about entertainment, enlarging the bank balance of a few players and promoting the image of the sponsor.

Sir Allen Stanford, the imposing Texan billionaire with a truckload of spare cash to invest in cricket, thinks the shorter format, and not the Test version, will help popularise and increase revenues for the game. He believes Twenty20 can generate revenue through television in a way that will allow cricketers to be rewarded as well as other professionals.

He has got one thing right. Cricket needs more people coming through the turnstiles and Twenty20 has brought out the fans in droves.

However, Sir Allen, first and foremost, is a businessman whose priority is promoting himself and his companies. The traditionalists among us know fully well that Test cricket is still the greatest form of the game, and the plan should be to make it more attractive to the public through having more sporting pitches and evenly-matched teams.

The truth is, some Test cricket is boring and lacking in genuine quality. We can bite the bullet and introduce innovations such as day-night Tests. There is nothing new in the concept of floodlit Tests - Kerry Packer tried them out with limited success during his World Series Cricket revolution - but could it bring another dimension to the game where it seems only the Ashes series is still afforded five matches?

At the end of the day, though, the game needs quality and bonafide stars more so than experiments.

Twenty20 is guaranteed its place in this money-obsessed age, but cricket can ill-afford to have Test cricket, the purest form, on the back burner.

Whether we refer to them as the Stanford Superstars or the West Indies, if they win next month's millionaire stakes, all we will have when the script is written is a cast of cricketers with deep pockets and large egos but still short in quality and still ranked eighth in the world. No amount of millions will change that overnight.