Sorry to go on for so long, but there's no shorter way of explaining it. Or at least, I couldn't think of one.

So everyone's got an idea of who the best Test team is at any given time. The World Test Championship is an attempt to formalise that, by identify who the best two teams are every so-many years, and having them play for this spurious title. But it's smoke and mirrors, really.

The PGA / European Tour is where the status is, but the LIV tour is where the money is. The same with the cricket establishment and the IPL. One of the ways the establishment is trying to survive is the invention of this World Test Championship.

Do they give up on the format, or do their best to keep it relevant? They're trying to keep it relevant, but they have their work cut out. The reason they have their work cut out is that the Indian Premier League, IPL, exists as the LIV golf to the establishment's US PGA / European Tour.

Sorry Liam, I was in The Other Place. Better pull up a chair.

Test cricket is the purest form of cricket. It's the oldest, the one where legends are carved in stone. However. Test cricket isn't quite suited to the modern world, so that leaves the cricket authorities with a problem.

They play the county/state sides too, in the same pattern as Lions rugby tours. The Cricket World Cup games are played over one day, so tournaments are possible. There's crossover between the two formats, but being successful at Test cricket doesn't mean success in one-day cricket, and vice versa.

What tournament do you mean? Test cricket doesn't have tournaments, as such. A single test match takes five days to play, so a tournament would take forever. Test cricket is organised by teams going on tour to each other and playing one, three, or five Tests there.

Best thing he ever wrote.

There's very low levels of interaction. The reality is that people are still in the other place, myself included. Once a social network has dominance, it's very hard to unseat it, no matter how much it's changed from what it once was.