I don't think Ireland get too much money, I think the Associates don't get enough.
The problem with cricket is not that we are run by CEOs but that CEOs are guiding the ideology of the game. It is not enough to make a lot of money, boards must make all the money then hoard it for themselves. This is why even the smaller boards like NZC are going full evil and trying to turn NZ into a T20 only side within 20-50 years. That and I am highly skeptical on how much NZC claim test matches cost them. Losing 700k on hosting one game that will take center stage around the holiday season in our national summer sport is not an indictment on test cricket but an indictment on the complete incompetence, cynicism and probable sabotage from NZC.
People will watch, and put their money into, what we perceive as interesting or valuable. Sometimes this is entirely organic from the grassroots, but we don't really acknowledge how top down imposition is almost required for grassroots interest to enter the wider public consciousness. When I was a teenager it was socially acceptable to say no one cares about women's cricket because they're not as good as men and never will be. The White Ferns won a World Cup and I couldn't tell you who was in that team. Aimee Mason was a cricketer in that decade but that's about it for what teenage Phlegm could have said.
In 2022 women's cricket has never been bigger and it is only growing. My team is knocked out but I can name the entire first choice side plus the notable players from the other teams and this world cup has been awesome. I never would have bothered to watch the White Ferns, Women's Super Smash and Women's Big Bash (the most watchable T20 competition in the world for test fans tbh) if they weren't so freely accessible to anyone with a Spark Sport or Sky account and they weren't plastered on TV all summer. I don't have time to hunt stuff down or the inclination when there are so many fun sports to watch. Since I had easy access to it for 2 years, I got hooked.
Now I know that this is almost a happy accident, since a large part of the women's game being imposed on us (I say imposed because that is what it was, even though I love it) was due to the social and political pressures of our time. I am sure with further time the womens game can become another cash cow for the CEOs, and a women's IPL imposed on the Indian public by the BCCI would absolutely explode the women's game to an extent to make the current explosion look tiny, but I am glad this accident occurred.
So then, it is pretty obvious what an ICC with genuine intentions would do to nuture the test game, but they will not because there is no external pressure to do so and in the absence of an external pressure that could threaten future profit, they will not.
It is almost certain test cricket would be even more popular, and even more profitable, than it already is if the ICC put in the work, but their current goal is a top down imposition on us that we do not like test cricket unless it is the Ashes, the Border-Gavaskar or whatever you call an India-England cripple fight these days.
The ICC full members would much prefer to tell us we cannot understand a Pakistan vs NZ test match unless it has a "context" in the World Test Championship and that we prefer T20 cricket with the occassional ODI world cup. They definitely do not think we ever want to watch Ireland or The Netherlands play New Zealand in a test match, because while they understand a lot of people enjoy watching test cricket for its own sake and I don't need Ireland or the Netherlands to be competitive or contextualised to find them interesting, they would much rather we pay, advertisers pay and broadcasters pay for 3 T20 matches in the same timeframe as one test match takes. I was really looking forward to our Ireland test match, and last year I wanted NZ to tour there after the WTC final as both something fun and it would give at least some of the 9 players who did not play the final a reward for being part of the squad.
I will be fair and say I like the WTC because leagues and finals are fun and I think it was a genuine attempt to draw in new fans, but I did not need it to find test cricket enjoyable and test cricket does not need it to expand if actual work is done. It is a fun competition though.
