WTC Final: Former India player questions One-Off Final, voices for three-match Test series

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Former India cricketer Aakash Chopra has questioned the methods of determining the World Test Championship winners by a one-off Test match.

ICC introduced World Test Championship (WTC) where teams play Test matches for a two-year cycle. The top two teams at the end of each cycle go on to play a Final and the winner there is determined as the WTC Champion for that cycle.

India are taking on Australia in the WTC Final 2023 as the two teams occupied the top two spots in the WTC 2021-23 cycle. As they play the Final at the Oval which has already started today (June 7), former Indian opener Aakash Chopra has asked the credibility of a single Test match to determine a winner of the WTC.

On his Twitter page, Chopra wrote, "Find it really uncomfortable that you are okay to have a championship spread over two years...but can't find time for a three-test series at the end of the 24-month cycle. While everybody claims that it's the Ultimate Format, nobody has the time to give the respect it deserves."

The former player believes a three-match Test series should be the way to determine the WTC Finals winner, whereas he also added that the older method to hand over the ICC Test Mace as the top performing team was the right way to determine the winners.

"If you can't accommodate three-tests, why bother with the finals at all? The team that has topped the table over 2-years should be given the mace...as it used to be the case earlier. In any case, there's no uniformity in terms of how many Tests each series should have," Chopra wrote in another tweet.

It is not a difficult thing for ICC to incorporate a three-match Test series to crown the Test Championship, as a one-off Test match may not be fair to determine the good deeds of a two-year performance.