A trophy for a format that had never had one
Test cricket had been played for 142 years without any means of deciding who was best at it, beyond a ranking table nobody could explain quickly. The International Cricket Council approved the idea of a championship in 2010 and then failed to stage it twice, in 2013 and again in 2017, on both occasions because the broadcast money was easier to find elsewhere. The competition that finally started on 1 August 2019, with the first Test of the Ashes at Edgbaston, was a compromise: no new fixtures, just a points system laid over the bilateral series that were going to be played anyway.
That compromise produced the format's central oddity. Nine teams each played six of the other eight, three series at home and three away, and the series ranged from two Tests to five. To stop the teams playing longer series from accumulating more points, the ICC fixed the value of every series at 120 points and divided it by the number of matches. A win in a two-Test series was therefore worth two and a half times a win in a five-Test one, which meant that England, playing more Tests than anybody, could win eleven matches and finish fourth.
The pandemic rewrites the table
From March 2020 the schedule came apart. Six series were postponed and several were never played. By November the ICC had accepted that teams would finish the cycle having played different numbers of series, and changed the basis of the table from points won to the percentage of contested points won. India went to the top, New Zealand were second, and Australia, who had been docked four points for a slow over rate against India at Melbourne in December 2020, finished third by seven-tenths of a percentage point.
Southampton
The final was moved from Lord's to the Rose Bowl because of the bio-secure arrangements the pandemic still required. It rained. The first day was lost entirely, the fourth almost entirely, and on the morning of the sixth, the reserve day, a draw looked the likeliest result. India, 64/2 overnight and 32 ahead, lost Virat Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara to Kyle Jamieson before the lead reached 40, and after Rishabh Pant's 41 the last four wickets went down for 14 runs. New Zealand were left 139 to win in 53 overs. Kane Williamson, who survived an lbw decision on one by review, and Ross Taylor took them there with seven overs to spare.
It was New Zealand's first global title, won eight days after they had beaten England in a Test series and two years after they had lost a World Cup final on a boundary count.