International cricket

There was no formal structure of international cricket until the early twenty-first century. It had long been traditional for countries, without any intervention from a body such as the International Cricket Council (ICC), to organise for themselves the various cricket matches. The ICC later committed the Test cricket playing nations to play each other in a programme of matches over a period of 10 years known as the Future Tours Programme (FTP). This system was set up to encourage some of the better-established countries to play the lesser nations more frequently.