Cricket has always had a peculiar vocabulary. The sport’s baffling use of language is part of its charm – naming a boundary fielder after a Graham Greene novel, for instance – but there have been recent additions to the lexicon I refuse to endorse. Bowlers putting “tail” on the ball – as if the word swing did not exist – or batsmen hitting it “downtown”. I hoped with the World Cup over we would have seen the end of the frankly gruesome use of “slot”, which seems to have been widely accepted as a bona fide technical term for a hittable length in limited-overs cricket. Yet there it was, leaping out of commentator’s mouths during the Edgbaston Test: “That’s right in his slot.”

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I’m aware this kind of talk makes me sound like an absolute Victorian but I can’t help it – there is something about the combination of these words that makes me feel actively queasy. If the Lord’s Test this week involves Mitchell Starc tailing the ball into Jason Roy’s slot and Roy decides to go downtown on it, please send someone to my house immediately with smelling salts.

The other word that has snuck up on us with terrifying stealth is “bilaterals”. The first time I heard it I assumed people were discussing a set of muscles that England’s gym‑bunny cricketers had been honing in the weights room. It turned out this was the trendy way of talking about a two-team series. It does not seem to matter that every Test series is a bilateral one (Wisden records one triangular Test tournament in 1912, but the first world war broke out two years later and no one has dared attempt it since).

Now cricket is implementing a brand new World Test Championship to bring fresh purpose to its pre-existing bilateral arrangements – and if that does not set your heart racing, read it again in Laura Kuenssberg’s voice. This Ashes series is the opening salvo of a two-year umbrella tournament that will climax with a Lord’s final between the top two Test sides in the world, and crown one of them the ultimate champion. (You thought the World Cup was a long old competition? You have 23 more months of this one.)

If you are not sure what to think about the World Test Championship, all I can say is, welcome to the club. I have not seen many people tweeting their boiling-hot take on this supposedly revolutionary development and I can only assume that is because hardly anyone has one. The whole thing feels entirely meh. Be honest, the fact that Australia went 24 points up in the WTC is not even the hundredth most interesting thing about that Edgbaston Test – it is easily beaten by the shirt number of Matthew Wade (13 – is the man daring destiny?) and the exact order of body parts Steve Smith needs to touch before he settles at the crease.

There are many reasons it is hard to get excited about the World Test Championship. It has one of those complicated mathematical structures that you care about only if you’re a 21st-century Fermat. I have found it hard for my mind to encompass a tournament that requires me to look further ahead than my current mortgage deal.

No one is convinced that the eventual winner will be the best Test side in the world because the system is such that not everyone plays each other on an equal footing. That the ICC will keep operating its world rankings system, which is arguably a better indicator of position, is another oddity.

And yet I cannot argue with its intentions. Cricket’s overpopulated and frankly messy sporting calendar has lost a good chunk of its meaning, not to mention its stakes, prestige and jeopardy. Test cricket is being drowned in the commercial deluge of one-day and T20 tournaments and whatever meaning is attached to the longer form of the game is under constant attack from its money-hungry boards, the very people who administer it.

It used to be that Test series were their own raison d’être and cricket was almost unique in that regard. Its narrative structure has not been the same as other sports’ – an annual gathering of neighbours for hemispherical bragging rights, or a mega-tournament that decides, once every four years, who is king of the world. The story of international cricket has always been more linear and long form – a continuing epic with each new encounter appended to the scroll.

From the Ashes, to the Caribbean tours, to India v Pakistan, it is the history between the two sides that has brought meaning to the match-ups, layering angst and nuance, pride and grudge. It is why lovers of the game are so well versed in matches from eras we were not alive to see. These are our origin stories, woven into our understanding of what it means for Michael Holding to bowl at Tony Greig or for Virat Kohli’s India to triumph in Australia.

Those stories grew out of a very specific context. They were an imperial legacy that gave England its lead-character importance for decades, even as other nations played, and evolved, the game better. Tradition counted. It is why many – or most – England and Australia fans care more about the result of the Ashes than any other cricketing contest.

I am not saying that position is wrong, just that it is not hugely progressive. As it is, India now dominates the global game in a way that is itself rewriting the sport’s narrative. A tournament that might, at least in a future iteration, elevate each competing nation to equal status can be only a good thing. There was no more encouraging or eye‑opening sight at this summer’s World Cup than the happy, passionate crowds representing all sides, from Afghanistan and New Zealand to Pakistan and Bangladesh. If the World Test Championship can bring us more of that, there’s a reason to get behind it.

Emma John is the host of the Guardian’s cricket podcast, The Spin