Broke my rule of not talking about hypothetical tournament structures after waking up at 5am and posting on reddit.
So, here it is. I can bookmark this so I don't have to ever post it again. In response to a post about promotion and relegation for the WTC.
One way to implement two divisions would be having a preliminary round at the start of each cycle with teams qualifying for divisions like the Super 6 in World Cups. This would mean the division you are in is only for the cycle and not pemanent or subject to promotion/relegation.
The other way would be just having two groups for 5/6/7 that are shuffled each cycle based on rankings or position in the last tournament.
The only other option, for me, would be replacing the WTC and having a multi-format World Championship that uses a points system for each series like the Women's Ashes. This would make almost all bilateral cricket matter. Series could have a minimum number of tests and wouldn't need to be even with the number of series wins ranking teams.
However, I just can't see teams risking losing their cash cow series and/or losing/sharing the income from them. What we have now is far from perfect (I'd rather England won the Ashes than the WTC) but the WTC is probably the best we can hope for given all the conflicting interests of individual boards.
I'm in favour of a shared income model, but, unless more money is found, the richer boards would lose out. How would they try and make up for that loss? More meaningless T20 bilateral series. I would like to see more done to support boards that are struggling, what England are doing with Zimbabwe might be a way forward, essentially giving them more money towards the tour.
