Why Adil Rashid's decision is warranted: T20 and Test cricket are diverging so fast players cannot keep up with both

On the evening of 29 August 1895, officials from the leading northern rugby clubs met at the George Hotel, in Huddersfield. They were fed up with the elitism of southern clubs, and their insistence that players remain unpaid. At half past six, officials voted to form a Northern Rugby Football Union. Nine days later, the first season of rugby league began. One sport had fragmented into two.

Increasingly, the parallels with modern cricket seem inescapable. The sport does not face a de jure split, as rugby did 123 years ago. Instead it is a game undergoing a de facto split - with Test and T20 cricket both under the overall control of the same governing bodies, and yet the two games are still becoming unrecognisable, not merely in the rhythms of the matches themselves but in the personnel of those who play them. 

Consider the fates of a Yorkshire pair in recent weeks.

First, Joe Root entered the Indian Premier League auction for the first time, saying that he needed to play to ensure he “didn't get left behind” in T20. None of the IPL franchises bid for him. Partly this reflected that Root would not have been available for the final stages of the tournament either this year or next. But it also reflected a belief that, for all his qualities, T20 has already left Root behind. He has fine T20 numbers, but the sport is evolving so rapidly that franchises deemed these almost irrelevant. What matters is that Root has only played eight T20 matches since the end of the 2016 World Twenty20. Franchises doubt whether he will be able to combine being an outstanding Test batsman with being an elite T20 player too - and aren’t even prepared to give him a chance to prove them wrong.

Then, this week, a couple of days before turning 30 - ordinarily the age when legspinners peak - Adil Rashid announced that he was opting out of red ball cricket with Yorkshire next season, and preferred to only play white ball cricket instead. If Rashid proved a flawed Test bowler, his record - 38 wickets at 42.78 in ten Tests - was hardly devoid of promise; he took more wickets at a lower average than Moeen Ali managed in those same games. 

Yet if Rashid is exceptional, it is only because he was an international T20 player who had still been attempting to play Test cricket too. Of the 22 players in the last World Twenty20 final only six have played Tests since. And only three - Root, Ben Stokes and Moeen Ali - have done so since 2016.

The shift is being driven by money, of course: the huge financial rewards available in T20, especially for players from beyond the sport’s economic big three of Australia, England and India. With T20 leagues now ubiquitous, there is always a tournament, somewhere, to play in without players needing to be involved in the longer formats. Leading Caribbean players can earn three times more playing in T20 leagues than in every game for the West Indies. 

These rewards are being compounded by the relentless schedule. It is not merely that club versus country clashes have become the norm; it is also that country versus country clashes have. Last year, Australia played a T20 at home and a Test match in India in consecutive days. The sheer relentlessness of the international schedule has driven selectors to reserve players for certain formats. That can be seen in England’s rejigging of central contracts in 2016, putting white-ball only contracts on a par with red-ball only ones, and how they appear to have marked out Jos Buttler, Alex Hales, Liam Plunkett and Rashid out as white ball specialists. Only three England players in the ongoing T20 tri series - Tom Curran, Dawid Malan and James Vince - played in the Ashes.

And yet perhaps the biggest driver of the growing divergence in personnel between Test and T20 cricket isn’t cash or the schedule, but rather skill. For all but the very best cricketers in the world - think of AB de Villiers, Virat Kohli or Mitchell Starc - the skills needed to thrive in Test and T20 cricket are so distinct that it has become almost impossible to keep pace in both. Many others, even those written off as white-ball specialists - with the lingering implication that this is somehow a sign of moral inferiority - would actually like to play both T20 and Tests. It is just that they realise that in trying to play both, they risk being good enough in neither. 

The qualities needed to thrive in modern T20 are so extraordinary - think of what is needed to be able to hit a range of different scoop shots with the precision to evade fielders placed for the very shot - that they demand ever-more of a cricketer's training and thinking. Samuel Badree has not played a first-class game for nine years. Instead, he devoted himself to being a pioneer - the first legspinner in T20 to be a specialist opening bowler - who would become the number one T20 bowler in the world, win two World T20 titles and take an IPL hat-trick.

“I have actually forgotten how the red ball feels. And I'm not really bothered too much to be honest. I really like white ball cricket,” he explained last year, suggesting that the West Indies’ deleterious relationship between the players and board had actually helped them become the best T20 team in the world. “I think that's really the reason why we are successful; that experience and that knowledge that we have of the other teams, having played in the same dressing rooms with these guys and played in different conditions.” In the five years from 2012, the seven players with the most T20 appearances in the world were all Caribbean. 

The West Indies specialised more by luck than design, and yet in the process they showed a template for how players could become the best T20 players possible: by committing exclusively to T20, just as a modern rugby player must commit exclusively to league or union. 

And so, while there has been bewilderment about Rashid’s decision, given he was not picked up in either the Pakistan Super League or Indian Premier League, perhaps his very absence from these leagues crystallised his thinking. If Rashid wants to play in these leagues in the future, then devoting himself exclusively to white-ball cricket gives himself the best chance of being good enough to get picked up. Look at how Australia, with a side fresh from two months of playing exclusively T20 in the Big Bash, and containing only Warner of those who won the Ashes, are eviscerating England and New Zealand in the ongoing T20 triseries.

The real question, then, is not whether Rashid’s decision represents a harbinger of the future; without a radical change to the schedule, greater specialisation is inevitable. It is whether the demands - of both schedule and skill - ultimately render it impossible to thrive in both Test and T20 cricket simultaneously. Cricket might not have its 1895 moment, but it could reach the same endgame: of one sport effectively becoming two.