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Test cricket is truly the gold standard of world cricket, where only the best teams compete against gruelling matches that span across four innings and can take as long as five days to complete. It’s a different game entirely from limited overs cricket, and the teams here are all playing the long game in a tournament where slow and steady almost always wins the race. There’s no formal tournament structure here: instead, all ten of the Test status teams circulate play with each other, in a format roughly designed to ensure that every team plays each other over within no less than six years, with a running ranking system keeping score, while perpetual trophies between each set of opposing teams go back and forth depending on the last winner. This is the pinnacle of cricket, where endurance, stamina and mental fortitude mark the difference between winning and losing.

NatWest Series

This One Day International cricket competition first took place in England in 2000, sponsored by the National Westminster Bank. Originally it took on a triangular format, where England and two visiting international teams would all play each other once before the top two sides would go on to face each other in a final at the historic cricket grounds of Lord’s. The triangular format was done away within 2006 when it was decided that England would engage in separate series against each visiting team. This tournament has not been held since 2012.

Officiated by the England and Wales Cricket Board, the ECB Premier League is the top promotion in British regional cricket. This division functions as a showcase for the future developments of the United Kingdom’s cricketing talent, and there’s been nary an Ashes star who hasn’t touched the green coming up in this competition. In addition to the competitive impetus, the ECB participants are expected to fly the flag for the sport and inculcate the next generations of talent waiting in the wings to make their mark on the international scene. Although the players are mostly drawn from Wales and Great Britain, there’s a provision for each side to accommodate an international player, in a system that mirrors commensurate participatory systems in South African and Australian divisional memberships.

Following on from the premise of the ECB league, the Royal London One-Day Cup is a single innings tournament limited to fifty overs that take in the very best of regional cricketing talent from the sport’s parent nation. Although it initially started with an over-limit comparable to the Twenty20 match format, the fifty limit was adopted to bring the competition in line with the standard One Day International format. The eighteen teams involved have always displayed a tendency to play some absolutely ferocious games of cricket, as the players have always known full well that prospering in this division is a great way to make one’s name on the road to getting called up to the international big leagues.