Inside the Room Where Cricket’s Future Was Quietly Being Rewritten

Cricket has been asking the wrong question. For years, the conversation has centred on which format survives — Test or T20, tradition or commerce, purist or populist. On Thursday evening at the House of Nomad, Taj Lands End, Mumbai, a different question was being asked. Not which format wins, but how the game grows.

That question came from Gaurav Bahirvani, founder of Test Twenty, who has spent the better part of the last two years building an answer. His journey began in December 2024, as he walked out of a meeting with the ICC, where the consensus was grim: Test cricket was losing relevance, ODIs were all but redundant, and T20 was oversaturated. Where others saw a dead end, Bahirvani saw a gap. Test Twenty was born.

On Thursday, he brought that vision to Mumbai — and he did not come alone. AB de Villiers, one of the most celebrated batsmen the game has ever produced, sat alongside him. So did Rajkumar Sharma, the man who shaped Virat Kohli and is one of Indian cricket’s most respected coaching minds. The room was intimate, the conversation honest.

De Villiers did not sugar-coat his initial reaction. “I thought it was crazy,” he said, laughing. But he listened. And what he heard was not a pitch for disruption; it was a case for development. Test Twenty is not targeting existing audiences. It is targeting those cricket has not yet reached — the age group that the game has been unable to hold. That distinction changed everything for de Villiers. “Cricket is the winner,” he said.

That line lingered long after the evening ended, because it reframes the entire debate. Test Twenty is not a threat to the formats that exist. It is a commitment to those who are yet to fall in love with the game.

Mumbai got a first look at the exclusive launch — and AB de Villiers is already convinced.

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