It’s fair to say that the Coral landscape of international cricket is changing due to Twenty20 and in the same way Capability Brown changed the gardens in the 1750’s the crash, bang, wallop of the twenty over format will too leave it’s mark on history.

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The popularity of the shortest form of the game at coral.com is bringing much needed revenue to the sport but is also taking the focus away from test cricket with fans appetites focusing more on shorter games. Take for example England’s up and coming tour of India.

You’d expect that a meeting of these two bastions of cricket at www.coral.co.uk would provide five or, at the very lease, three test matches but when the itinerary was announced on Monday it included just three with seven one day internationals.

Now this may just be an anomaly in fixture planning but this could represent a worrying trend.

Also its seems that making Coral money in the lucrative Indian Premier League is overtaking playing for your country. Sri Lanka’s top players are likely to be released to play in the IPL instead of touring England next summer. Meanwhile Pakistan could find themselves subject of a player revolt as they have refused to let their cricketers player in the league as they tour Australia.

In years to come we may be looking back at 2008 as the year test cricket started to die.

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Posted on August 1st, 2008 by Trix
Filed under: Twenty 20 Cricket