The ICC Test Championship Mace on display © Getty Images

Emma John has an amusing article in the Guardian about the mace presented to the top Test team in the world. She wonders whether the ICC decided on a mace as a prize since it signifies "authority, power, medieval concepts of feudalism".

As prizes go, the mace is gloriously bonkers, a surreal reminder of just how trivial a concept sport is. Congratulations, you have won a purely fictitious battle, whose outcome is of no lasting consequence – now have this ludicrously expensive replica of an ancient bludgeoning instrument. And yet, given the chance to have my photo taken with any sort of trophy or even – crikey – hold one, I will go weaker at the knees than Ben Foden at a Saturdays gig. Maybe it's because they're markers of permanence in an otherwise impermanent and ultimately meaningless milieu. As Keats said, a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. And a mace is for life, not just for Christmas.

The time is right for a World Test Championship, writes Mike Atherton in the Times. The concept is nothing new, he says, and 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.

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.

Future West Indian administrators might just be competent enough to assemble a decent team for World Cups and Twenty20 tournaments. But in Test cricket their incompetence is now a sorry fact; and it might prove better for all concerned, in the long run, and after a painful separation, if the West Indian territories were to do what Trinidad proposes.

Scyld Berry, writing in the Telegraph, brings the point into context and believes though a Test Championship is great, the only trouble is that it is an idea whose time has not yet come.

Trinidad and Tobago are already talking of going their own way. Yes, it would be a great shame if they did. But only a common culture has held the Anglophone West Indian territories together, and this no longer appears to be strong enough. All other Test teams have been, and are, nation states.