A Number One That Means Nothing: The Case Against the Bilateral T20 International

Consider the week just gone. India were beaten four times out of four by England — one match washed away by the weather, the other four simply lost, the heaviest of them an evening at Trent Bridge where a batting line-up was folded up for 76. For their trouble England were pronounced the best Twenty20 side in the world, top of a ranking table that will be reshuffled long before the format’s only tournament that matters comes round again. And on Tuesday the same two teams reassemble at Edgbaston for the first of three one-day internationals, by which point the “number one” of Saturday will not be worth the breath it takes to mention. A whitewash, a coronation, and a shrug, all inside a fortnight.

I want to make an argument I suspect a good many people inside the game make privately and few will say aloud: the bilateral Twenty20 international, played between World Cups for no prize anyone can name, has quietly lost its reason to exist. Not the format — Twenty20 is a genuine and difficult game, and I have spent a fair share of my life in the commentary box celebrating it. It is the bilateral series I mean: five matches strung across a summer, decided, and forgotten, that settle nothing and cost the men who play them a great deal.

A contest is only ever as alive as the stakes it plays for. That is the first law of any sport worth watching, and cricket has honoured it for a century — the Ashes urn, the Ranji shield, a World Cup held aloft on the Lord’s balcony. Ask an honest question of the series just finished and the trouble is plain: what, precisely, was at stake? No trophy that anyone will remember, no place in a tournament earned or forfeited, no consequence beyond a ranking that behaves like a stock ticker — up on Saturday, down by the next window, meaningless as a measure of anything except the last side to hold it. A result that costs nothing teaches nothing. A 4–0 in that setting is not a verdict; it is weather.

And it is not free, whatever the fixture list pretends. Consider what the glut actually charges. The players pay in the coin of their bodies and their attention — cap after cap in matches that blur into one another, until international cricket, the thing that was once the summit of the whole pyramid, begins to feel like another lap of the franchise treadmill in a different shirt. The boards pay too, in a currency they affect not to notice: they cram so many of these fixtures into the calendar that they must rotate and rest and experiment, so that half the time a series does not even pit the two best elevens against each other — which rather gives the game away. If a contest is worth staging, you field your strongest side; if you dare not, because there is simply too much cricket, then you have already answered the question of whether it needed staging at all.

The instinct of a man who has spent his life inside the game is not to complain but to mend, so here is the mend. Give the bilateral Twenty20 international the one thing it lacks: consequence. Fold these series into a real competitive structure — a standings table that feeds directly into World Cup qualification and seeding, so that every match, however far from the final, becomes a rung on a ladder that leads somewhere. Play fewer of them, and mean them; a taut three-match series that settles a seeding is worth a dozen limp five-match ones that settle nothing. Protect the room on the calendar this frees for the red-ball and fifty-over cricket that the shortest format has been quietly crowding out. Let the ranking become the product of matches that mattered, rather than the consolation prize of matches that did not.

The other side deserves a proper hearing, and it is more substantial than the purists will allow. Bilateral cricket is how the game pays for itself — the broadcast money from a full English summer of India keeps the lights on from Chester-le-Street to the smallest board that could never fund itself on tournaments alone. It is also, genuinely, where young cricketers are forged: a debut at Southampton against a hostile crowd and a ball that moves teaches a boy more in three hours than a month of throwdowns ever will, and you cannot blood a whole generation only at World Cups that come round once in two years. And the spectators, who owe us nothing, want live international cricket in July — not an empty ground waiting on a tournament. None of that is trivial, and none of it should be waved away.

But look closely and every one of those goods survives the reform untouched. Matches that carry World Cup qualification still draw the broadcast money — more of it, if anything, once the result means something. A young man still wins his cap and learns his trade; he simply learns it in a match that counts, which is the only kind of match worth learning it in. The crowd still gets its July cricket, only now the scoreboard is telling them a story rather than merely killing an afternoon. What the reform strips out is not the funding, nor the blooding, nor the spectacle — it is only the emptiness at the centre of it, the nagging sense that players and watchers alike are going through motions that lead nowhere. More cricket was never the disease. More cricket that means nothing is.

I have sat through a great many of these series, and the tell is always the same — the flatness in a dressing room that has just won something it cannot quite believe was worth the winning, the speed with which the result evaporates from every memory, the victors’ included. A game that asks men to bleed for it owes them, in return, a reason; and a result they have fought for ought to leave a mark somewhere that outlasts the handshake — on the record, on a tournament, on the road to a summit. Give the bilateral Twenty20 international genuine stakes and even a whitewash becomes a story worth the telling. Leave it as it is — a coronation nobody will remember, handed out in a week the calendar had already moved past — and we should not be surprised when the players treat it as lightly as the game has taught them to, nor when the rest of us look up one day to find we have staged a thousand matches and can remember almost none of them.