RR owner Manoj Badale says Test cricket ‘could work’ if played in same short window each year

Will Test cricket have to be reduced to just short windows like the Wimbledon in tennis to make it a more viable product? Rajasthan Royals owner Manoj Badale thinks so.
Talking to the Tailenders podcast, Badale said: “We can make Test cricket work if we make it more of an event. We should have it at the same time every year, played between a small set of nations that can actually afford it and Lord’s becomes like a Wimbledon, an event that is the diary.”
The overladen annual calendar has forced many cricketers to call time on one or more format of the sport. England Test captain Ben Stokes, for example, retired from ODIs last July claiming that “there is too much cricket” and players “are not cars that can be refilled and go back out there”.
Badale said that the solution to this was thinking creatively in the way the schedules was made.
“The amount of times I hear arguments like ‘Ben Stokes wants to play Test cricket’ – that is important but what is really important is what the fans of the future want to watch and where are they going to spend their hard-earned money. We are going to have to think creatively about Test cricket if we want it to work,” said Badale.
Badale, in fact, believes that the world’s best players could be playing cricket on 220-230 days of the year, across T20, one-day and Tests soon.
He went on to add that he expects franchises to “become bigger entities” in the future.
“I do genuinely believe in the next three to five years there are a number of choices that the adminrators are going to make that are going to be really game-defining,” he said.
“We are the second most-popular sport in the world at the moment but our real competition is other forms of entertainment. We’ve got too many franchise leagues now so you can have a hierarchy of the IPL, some major leagues and then some minor leagues,” he added.