Twilight zone: Channel Ten says the Melbourne and Sydney Tests should remain daytime affairs. Credit:Getty Images "This has just been a great drama-filled Test match, one of the ones you love to watch." Former champion leg-spinner Shane Warne, now a Nine commentator, urged Cricket Australia to considered changing this year's Boxing Day Test to a day-nighter. Barham said having Brisbane join Adelaide as host of a day-night Test, as CA boss James Sutherland has flagged, would be "an absolutely fantastic idea". He would support the extension of that to Hobart Tests too. But he said he would oppose changing the Boxing Day and New Year Tests to be played under lights - and not just because of his position at Ten, which paid $100 million over five years for the BBL rights.

"I think there's some things you wouldn't change. Boxing Day is one of them. I just think that's too far - and I think Sydney is the same. Sydney is a great occasion, really well attended and really well respected for what it is," he said. CA has been strict in ensuring international matches and BBL matches are never scheduled head to head. The closest comes when BBL matches are scheduled on the evenings of the Tests at the MCG and SCG, across the last week of December and first week of January. Barham doubted CA would genuinely consider scheduling day-nights Tests at the same time as evening BBL matches, because of the potential negative repercussions. "From Cricket Australia's point of view they'll want to get the most value for their rights, so they'd be looking at it from a rights/revenue point of view as well as a cricketing promotion point of view. If they run Tests and BBL against each other and one audience is lower [than when run on their own] then so are their rights fees [next time they are negotiated]," he said. "They're different products for different audiences, and both achieving different objectives. You're only going to harm one or the other's audience, so I don't think they're ever going to do that."

Typically Ten would be expected to be the loser if BBL matches were to be scheduled against Tests. This season, however, it could theoretically challenge that based on how many of the West Indies' best-known players, such as Chris Gayle and Dwayne Bravo, will be playing BBL instead of in the Test series. Halting the BBL for the duration of the MCG and SCG Tests, were they to be played at night, would rob BBL teams of one of the key periods to attract spectators. "The trick to get summer right is to find slots for all the different types of cricket they want to promote. Big Bash is bringing a whole new audience to cricket, which is important to them, while Test cricket is keeping the older audiences there. To clash them would be, I would have thought, disaster," Barham said. "There's a place for all these different competitions, including the Sheffield Shield, across the summer. It's about juggling and making it work best . . . to make all of the different formats work." Ten is about to begin year three of a five-year deal to broadcast BBL.