The time is right for a World Test Championship. To that end, MCC’s World Cricket Committee (of which I am a member) has been meeting the ICC’s Cricket Committee this week in Dubai to persuade them of the merits of a championship to start immediately, based around a two-year cycle and on the present Future Tours Programme (FTP), so as not to disrupt television contracts. There is no reason to delay.

Test cricket is routinely sold out months in advance in England and is held in high esteem by players, administrators and the cricket-watching public. Therefore, we are often unaware of the indifference felt by the majority of cricket-playing nations towards the five-day game.

The empty stands that greeted the two top Test teams in South Africa last winter prompted MCC to commission research into the popularity or otherwise of Test cricket. The findings did not make for happy reading.

The research is limited by the small sample size — 1,500 or so cricket followers in India, New Zealand and South Africa, three countries where attendances for Test cricket have been declining — but the trend is clear. In New Zealand, only 19 per cent of those regular followers said that Test cricket was their favourite form of the game, declining to 12 per cent in South Africa and a measly 7 per cent in the market that really matters — India.

Among those asked, there was unanimous support for the idea of a World Championship. The appeal was that every Test match would count for something and every game would take place within an automatic context and in a way that would be easily understood.

In India, for example, 82 per cent of regular cricket followers said that they were more likely to attend if a championship was instituted. Interestingly, over-rates, drawn games and bland pitches were not cited as off-putting reasons. Ticket prices and the times during which the games were played, (ie, during working hours) were.

The idea of a World Test Championship is nothing new. In fact, a version exists, although you need a degree in quantum mathematics to understand how the ICC’s ranking system works — and, indeed, international captains routinely rubbish its significance.

In 1995 Matthew Engel, the influential editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, put forward a proposal and throughout 2008 employees of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) worked out of Cricket Australia’s offices to come up with a proposal.

The result of BCG’s efforts, based around a four-year cycle that involved the pooling of television monies, met resistance from India and England, the countries that benefit most from TV revenue and did not fancy sharing the proceeds.

That deadlock prompted Martin Crowe, the former New Zealand captain, an MCC World Cricket Committee member and among the brightest, most innovative minds in the game (Crowe was responsible for a version of Twenty20 in New Zealand long before it was introduced in Britain) to work out a solution that would be acceptable to all by integrating a championship into existing fixture lists and television contracts.

His concern primarily was for those low to mid-ranking teams, such as New Zealand and West Indies, who have little chance of reaching the top of the rankings over a four-year cycle and whose players are being tempted by the monies on offer in the Indian Premier League (IPL), which their boards cannot match.

He reckoned that these Test teams, with fragile human resources that cannot withstand a “talent drain” to the IPL, to be particularly vulnerable. Crowe presented his document last summer; it has been tweaked slightly and was presented to the ICC this week.

The concept is a simple one. The FTP would continue in its present form, allowing, for example, five-match “icon” series between England and Australia to continue and allowing all the existing television deals to be honoured.

The top eight teams would qualify, which would “relegate” Bangladesh, so their Test matches would not count towards the championship. (That in itself may encourage “rest” periods for top players and allow Bangladesh to develop at a slightly less rarefied level.) Bangladesh would play off against the eighth-ranked team after the first championship is concluded, to decide who would play in the next two-year cycle.

Existing Test series would continue between November 2009 and July 2011, each match awarded points on a simple sliding scale: four for a win, two for a tie, one for a draw, none for a loss. Given that countries are scheduled to play a different number of matches over the period (England, for example, are due to play 22 Tests, Australia 20, South Africa 17 and Sri Lanka the least with only nine), the table will be formed on the average number of points gained per match. At the end of this two-yearly cycle, there will be semi-finals and/or a straight final played over six days in the country of the team who are top of the table.

As an example, MCC looked at the most recent two-year cycle, during which Australia and South Africa seesawed at the top of the table for the first 18 months until the Ashes series, which sent Australia into fourth below India and Sri Lanka. A play-off final would have taken place in South Africa, after which the two-year cycle would begin again.

There are obvious drawbacks to the proposal: not everyone plays the same amount of matches; not everyone necessarily plays everyone else in that cycle; and the teams languishing near the bottom in year two might find themselves with little to play for.

However, within the constraints of the FTP (which India and England especially are unlikely to want to throw out and which is about to be ratified until 2016), it is about the best solution any of us can think of.

The main advantage is that every Test would count for something in a way that the public can easily identify with, and the discrepancy in points for a win and a draw would encourage positive cricket.

There are other important issues to address if Test cricket is not to wither away in places such as India, where international Twenty20 is overwhelmingly the most popular form of the game.

Ticket costs can be addressed more subtly, so that session-by-session pricing could be introduced to encourage those who would like to watch for the evening session, say, after work. And day-night Test cricket must be given a trial as a priority — not in England, where they were hoping to play a day-night Test next summer, but in places where day-night cricket makes sense.

Other issues were discussed in Dubai, two of which came about as a result of issues raised recently in this column, namely the Spirit of Cricket and the deregulation of the 50-over game.

It is the World Championship of Test cricket, though, that remains the key concern, the implementation of which may give the Test arena the boost it badly needs.