Tuesday, April 2, 2002 Australia's cricket administrators may have, as one journalist put it, stabbed Zimbabwe in the back. Just as carelessly, they have poked themselves in the eye. By pulling out of their tour to Zimbabwe, the safest two points this side of Bangladesh in the ICC Test Championship, Australia are in danger of slipping down the beanstalk they have spent the past three months trying to stay on top of (latest ICC Test Championship table).

When Australia's Test players eventually take the field again they will do so in September in Pakistan, a country where they have won only one match in the last 42 years and where series victories are as rare as rain in Oodnadatta. Yet because they won there last time, under Mark Taylor in 1998-99, Australia must win again to maintain their position in the ICC Test Championship. Lose and they will slump from 1.54 points to 1.38; draw, honourably or otherwise, and they will slip to 1.46.

Either way, the No. 1 team on Earth - on 1.50 points - will be South Africa, the same dispirited bunch of over-rated underachievers that the Australians have made a habit of humiliating. One small step back for Australia, one giant descent into farce for the ICC Test Championship.

This, of course, is merely the latest blow to the credibility of world cricket's premiership table, which has endured a nightmare run since being voted into existence 14 months ago. Christopher Martin-Jenkins, the influential Times correspondent, celebrated the championship's birth by pronouncing it "spurious". Steve Waugh called it "stupid". And then things really came unstuck.

Matthew Engel, the former editor of Wisden and the man who prodded the ICC into action - if only to shut him up - had hoped that a rolling world championship would "raise the game's profile" and give Test cricket a "context". September 11 put paid to that.

Engel believed, furthermore, that it would "give shape to the present mish-mash of world cricket". That "shape" has proved an absurdly distorted one, highlighted by the theoretical world-title fight between Australia and South Africa - a running joke in which the punchline was the fact that Mark Boucher's men were only a couple of thunderstorms away from being crowned world champions. Frank Keating, the Guardian newspaper's elder statesman, spoke for many recently when he damned it as "lunacy", "completely dotty", a "sham", a "manipulative stratagem" and "the ICC's barmy numbers racket".

Well, up to a point, maybe. However, it is worth remembering that the table was always going to be a little wonky until every country had played every other country home and away - which is not due to happen until September 2005. In the meantime it seems only fair that Australia are disadvantaged for their miserly refusal to play regularly against Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. It is a moot point whether their reluctance to take on the game's up-and-comers has been fuelled by arrogance or compassion - "Let the poor buggers fly a bit before we cut off their wings." But a few decimal points seem a small price to pay.

The other relevant factor is Australia's unstintingly abysmal record on the subcontinent. Steve Waugh may have lent the current Australian side extra steel, but he has notably failed to steal a series in Asia. His captaincy record there - one win, two draws, three defeats - is actually worse than that of Mark Taylor or Allan Border. In fact, the last Australian captain to boast a positive win-loss ratio on the subcontinent was Bill Lawry 33 years ago - and it's not every day you hear a kind word lavished on The Phantom's leadership skills.

South Africa, by contrast, have won in India and Pakistan, and drawn in Sri Lanka: feats that are not to be sneezed at. The ICC, on balance, has got things pretty much right, apart from the bizarre decision to classify a one-off Test in Zimbabwe as part of a home series for South Africa. Like World Series Cricket and its accompanying revolutions 25 years ago, the ICC Test Championship will one day be seen as an historic advance; its critics as so many dinosaurs with their heads in the sand.

There remain, however, a couple of quibbles. Firstly, it would seem no progress has been made towards winding back series between cricket's oldest superpowers - Australia, England and West Indies - from every four years to every five years. This would unclutter the timetable and relieve the mounting pressure on countries to contest series of three Tests - never a truly satisfying feast - rather than five.

Finally, and no less criminally, it would appear the ICC has shouldered arms to a key delivery in Engel's January 2001 submission: namely, that a trophy, the Bradman Cup as he envisaged it, be exhibited by the No. 1 Test nation and handed over the moment the lead changes.

To date, all the ICC has come up with is the Nameless Mace. True, we already have the Bradman Museum, Bradman Oval, Bradman Walk, Bradman Room, Bradman Stand, Bradman Oration, Bradman Trust, Bradman Foundation, Bradman Scholarship, Bradman Albums, Bradman Medal, several Bradman Trophies, a couple of Bradman Awards, and seven Bradman Roads, Streets and Avenues in Sydney alone. Indeed there already exists a Bradman Cup, handed out every year to the winners of an under-16 competition in regional New South Wales. Perhaps another would be overkill.

Yet there is no doubt the name Bradman still means something to cricket followers everywhere. And, in the absence of decent alternative suggestions, the Bradman Cup seems a worthwhile idea. It sure rolls off the tongue better than the ICC Test Championship.

Chris Ryan is a former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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