How to measure the health of a game? Is it by the revenue it raises or by the level of skill it shows to the world? Is it the coin or the contest? This is the crossroads at which international cricket has arrived. This month International Cricket Council chairman Jay Shah, Cricket Australia’s Mike Baird and England Cricket Board chairman Richard Thompson are due to meet to discuss splitting Test cricket into two tiers, possibly as soon as 2027. This must not happen.

Twelve nations play Test cricket: Australia, England, India, South Africa, West Indies, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Ireland, Zimbabwe and Afghanistan. Clearly they are not of the same level, and their aspiration to be the best, which necessarily involves pitting themselves against the best, would be manifestly harder to achieve under a two-tier system. The du jour catchphrase of “the best against the best” is shortsighted in the extreme.

Of course, one cannot argue with the numbers of patrons who attended the Melbourne and Sydney Tests between Australia and India (373,691 at the MCG over five days, breaking a record from 1936-37 over a six-day Test against England, and 141,518 at the SCG). They are phenomenal numbers, and cricket swims in the beauty of statistics, but the matches also gave to the crowds theatre of high drama and suspense. Even in the quiet moments on field, it pulsated.

Paradoxically, this spectacle created the danger of being blinded by it. A two-tier system would perpetuate the powerful at the top and condemn the rest to, if not invisibility, then irrelevance. What will become of the diversity of the game, if the opportunity to see a country touring here or following ours in another nation is severed? And what of the Ashes? What if either Australia or England fall into different tiers, for surely there must be a system of promotion and relegation to give a veneer of fairness and equality. No team ever stays on top; it’s a lesson of history that empires fall.

Of course, there must be room to evolve and adapt. Test cricket is the epitome of tradition, it cannot be traded away, though it has seen enormous change in recent decades. These are not the days of sailing to England for an Ashes series. Former India coach Ravi Shastri says that for Test cricket to survive and thrive it must be “the top teams play against each other more often, so there is a contest; you want contests”. But the two-tier system is not the way to go.

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There is no doubt Test cricket is under siege from Twenty20 franchise competitors, and it is the very nature of the latter format that there is no subtlety at play, no faint leg glance to the boundary; it is to bash opponents into submission. As The Age recently reported an industry source as saying: “It comes down to profitable cricket versus unprofitable cricket.”

Nine years ago, the two-tiers concept was floated at the ICC, with a model of seven nations in the top tier and five in the second. While Australia and England supported it, India did not. “The [Board of Control for Cricket in India] is against the two-tier Test system because the smaller countries will lose out and the BCCI wants to take care of them,” then-BCCI president Anurag Thakur said. “It is necessary to protect their interests. In the two-tier system, they will lose out on a lot, including revenue and the opportunity to play against top teams. We don’t want that to happen. We want to work in the best interests of world cricket and that is why our team plays against all the countries.”

This was a noble sentiment. One of the ways to nourish the best interests would be the wealthy nations pooling resources to help the poorer countries, but here the cricketing world now stands, with the two-tier system perhaps waiting to come into bat. The noble sentiment of 2016 appears to have been lost. Or in cricketing parlance, smashed out of the ground.