Will Test cricket survive the Age of India?

For the past three months the cricket press has concentrated on the destruction of the England cricket team at the hands of Australia. It now emerges that correspondents were missing a bigger story.

While Mitchell Johnson was carving up the England batting order, the England, Australia and India cricket authorities were doing the same to international cricket. In a carefully planned ‘bear-hug style’ take-over bid, tabled in Dubai this week, India, England and Australia have seized effective control of world cricket. South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, the West Indies and Sri Lanka, not to mention minnows like Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, have been reduced to second-class citizenship.

If implemented, this would be a victory for the raw economic power of India, aided and abetted by England and Australia. According to an agreement thrashed out late on Tuesday night at the headquarters of the International Cricket Council in Dubai, India has been granted a ‘central leadership responsibility’.