Mumbai: Only India, England and Australia get to plan, plot and hype their 5-Test duels. For the rest of the Test-playing nations, the format is no longer a choice. They play what they get or what they can.

Tests have increasingly become a marker for the unequal world that cricket is. Dig dipper and you find, hidden behind the finery of the World Test Championship arrangement, some teams have also become harder to beat at home than the others — giving them a huge lift in the WTC leaderboard.

Like Australia, who, since the inception of the World Test Championship in August 2019, have a win/loss ratio of 6.00 at home. India, who have always been virtually unbeatable on home soil, aren’t too far behind (5.66). New Zealand is the next most difficult team to beat in their neck of the woods, with a win/loss ratio of 3.0. England (2.25) come fourth followed by South Africa (2).

Many factors are responsible for this and the unequal schedule is just one of them. With the advent of T20 cricket and proliferation of franchise leagues, match-practice as a preparatory tool for foreign conditions has become a luxury.

“When you look around world cricket these days — and it has been for some time — it’s very difficult to tour other countries. The travelling teams don’t play two or three games prior to playing the first Test match to adjust to a country because nobody wants to tour for that long,” John Buchanan, former Australia head coach, told select media on sidelines of a CP Goenka school event in Mumbai.

Buchanan counts this as a primary reason to pick Australia to beat India in their upcoming series. “Australia is the favourite going into the series at this stage. When you go to Perth, where it’s fast and bouncy, for a side (India) that’s coming from...they will have played Bangladesh (and New Zealand) at home. The wickets will be completely different,” he added.

Conditioned to play a volume of T20 cricket, batting techniques are being tested more than ever before. India had a horror afternoon in the 2020 Adelaide Test facing the pink ball against Australia’s fearsome threesome – Pat Cummins, Mitch Starc and Josh Hazlewood. Similarly, last year in Indore, Australia spun the life out of Indian batting on a raging turner. When conditions are extreme, which can happen at intervals in Test cricket, modern batters tend to struggle.

“There is a solution. You’ve actually got to stop playing a lot of the T20 and the T10 leagues. But that’s not going to happen,” said Buchanan. “I don’t blame the players for wanting to exploit their skills financially. Who knows how long they’ve got...injury-wise, selection-wise, age-wise.”

Buchanan believes players have to figure out their own method and adapt better. It would help if the administrators, could for the least schedule better, by not asking players to hop from T20 cricket straight to the intense examination of five-day cricket.

“I just think there needs to be a place for the transition game between playing really short format games and the long format. You need to be able to work out how I adapt my game... bowler, batter, or fielder, from a really short game to a longer game. 50 overs, a longer version of the short game but a shorter version of the long game,” he said, making a case for the utility of ODI cricket.

“So, the answer is the more of one format you play, the more that sort of puts mind maps into the way that you then play. I think players need to be able to now do is to actually have a series of mind maps in there that tell them, how to play longer cricket,” he opined. “It’s just about adjusting your mindset to your technique to what the game is asking of you, right at the moment.”

Bazball tempered

Having combined with Brendon McCullum as coach-captain for Kolkata Knight Riders, Buchanan is not surprised by the New Zealander’s high-risk template as England coach. “Brendon has always been a risk taker. And that’s the style of the game he wanted England to adopt,” he said.

But the former coach admits that the reversals England faced in India has forced them to temper their methods. “England’s recent win against Sri Lanka (Manchester Test) was more about how to grind to a Test win. Maybe, Brendon is becoming more situational than necessarily pushing down this game of high-risk, high-return. It proved that way when they were here in India. Maybe they are becoming more situational in terms of tactics.”