The World Test Championship final is heading for quite the finish.  

As we sit, South Africa needs 69 runs to get their hands on the Mace, still the coolest trophy in sport.   

This means the game will actually get to day 4, a triumph in itself after the first two days where wickets tumbled with T20-like regularity, the game devolving into a war of attrition. It’s as if the players didn’t want to be there, and it’s easy enough to understand why.   

In the brave new world of T20 franchise baboonery —the money-soaked technicolour chimpanzees' tea party circus masquerading as cricket— test cricket is increasingly becoming a side show, a curious look back to the days where patience was a virtue. Although most players will run with the line that it is a true test and the pinnacle of the sport, this archaic 5-day concept is growing more and more difficult to justify. Hard core cricket fans will never turn their backs on the glory of the old school, so the long game will always have its place. But as the years tick by, the nature of the diminished human attention span, coupled with the financial and calendar-based stresses of keeping 5-day exchanges afloat, the game will slowly fade.   

The new generation of cricketers, with the avalanche of money and lack of hugely demanding physical and mental exertion T20 offers, could hardly be blamed for focusing their talents anywhere but the shortest form.  

The WTC, although a laudable concept, still needs to work to hold the attention of fans. A pertinent first move would be to base the final in the top qualifier's backyard. The detached energy of the bemused Lords spectators suggests that they’re there because they’re members, there for the experience, not because the care about the final result.   

As a lover of the long game, I hope that the WTC will remain and as time passes, the ICC will develop the series to bring the best of the exchanges to the fore. But with the demands placed on a time poor populace, the obscene money available to the players for little or no effort, and the wholly insignificant nature of the results of franchise T20 exchanges, hope might be all us old fellas have. 

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