Cricket is at risk of allowing a doping culture to flourish at its highest levels due to a testing regime that is "full of holes" and "ridiculous", according to leading experts.

In a wide-ranging Telegraph Sport investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the game, it can be revealed that:

Cricket lags significantly behind other sports in the volume and frequency of its drugs-testing

Two teams at the Cricket World Cup were not subject to any ICC whereabouts out-of-competition drugs testing prior to the tournament

Many of the biggest domestic Twenty20 leagues conduct just a handful of tests every year.

While the overall number of drug tests in world cricket has risen in recent years - from 944 in 2015 to 1,434 in 2018 - this is still far behind other comparable sports. In 2018 baseball conducted around 27,000 tests at Major and Minor League level in the USA, 19 times the amount of tests in cricket worldwide.

In England, just 323 tests were carried out under the auspices of the England and Wales Cricket Board and International Cricket Council , compared to 4,436 by the Football Association, 837 by the Rugby Football Union and 692 by UK Athletics.