Int'l Cricket Council CEO David Richardson said that the ICC "will be seeking to move closer to the establishment of a formal competition for test cricket as one of its priorities for the year," according to Mark Gleeson of REUTERS. Discussions with full members about a possible competition and its format "had already begun and will continue over the next months before a concrete proposal is placed in the organisation’s annual general meeting in June." Richardson said, "We want to make a huge effort this year to put something in place that will help us sustain the value of bilateral cricket and, in particular, the profile of test cricket. The Ashes are still extremely successful and generate lots of money and generally test series against India will generate money, but there are a lot of series that happen that do not make much more than just to cover the costs. ... If something does come of it, existing television deals means it would only be able to be implemented after 2019." The ICC’s "other priorities for this year" were the standardizing of the Umpire Decision Review System (DRS), to ensure a successful Twenty20 World Cup in India and to develop the game in the U.S. Richardson added, "We have engaged MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to do research on all the DRS technologies and, in particular, the edge-detection and ball-tracking so that we’ve got a institute with credibility to pronounce on that." He said that cricket in the U.S. "had potentials with more active players than test playing nations like New Zealand and Zimbabwe" (REUTERS, 1/5).
