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The 2009 edition of the Champions Trophy began on Wednesday, 377 days behind schedule and it seems not a lot of people care. Indeed ODI’s “second biggest event” has hardly been mentioned in the media.
I recently championed ODI’s here on The Roar and if I were to make a Top 10 of my favourite cricket memories, half of them would be from one-dayers but none of them from the Champions Trophy.
Is it just me or does everyone think it’s one of the most pointless competitions in world cricket?
I can’t rattle off the winners of past tournaments, I can’t tell you who played and won the inaugural match or the venue, nor who the leading run scorer of all time in the Champions Trophy is, who has the best bowling figures, the lowest team total, none of it. I could however answer all of those questions and much more if it was a World Cup you were asking me about, or ODI’s in general or even the Australian Tri-Series tournament.
So why persist with the tournament?
Well it certainly isn’t by popular demand from the players. They have long complained that they play too much cricket; the increase in stress related injuries would certainly support this as would the amount of broken relationships amongst Australian players over the last decade. All this at a time when the highly lucrative Twenty20 format is trying to find its niche and place on the ICC calendar.
The fans? Well I’ll be honest and say I barely watched the recent seven-match series against England. I am an ODI fan but I, like everyone else, have my limits. The Ashes was 25 days of cricket and you want to follow that up with seven more one-dayers, three of which were dead rubbers and then an eight team round-robin tournament a week later to boot?
The administrators then? Well, yes and no. On the one hand they are a money hungry, self-serving lot, on the other they know they cannot totally neglect player and fan interests and hence have to at least be seen to make an effort to improve the scheduling.
It must be the TV stations then, right? Again, while they too are in it for the dough they also know you can have too much of a good thing. Start having cricket on 24/7 and people find it less appealing and the flow-on effects from that are immediate.
So players want to play more Twenty20 but have less cricket in general, fans want to be entertained but not be force fed cricket until they’re sick of the sight of it, administrators want to make money but try to keep people happy (if only for their own sakes) at the same time and TV wants to keep people interested in the product they’re offering and make as much as they can in the process.
Something has to give, plain and simple, and I can’t see it being Test match cricket. While attendances between some countries are down, it’s still the purist version of the game and as long as there is cricket there will be Test match cricket.
Twenty20 will grow and become a regular part of the schedule so that only leaves ODI’s.
The World Cup has to stay, it is still cricket’s premier event and the minnows who somehow fluke it through Twenty20 games are found out in this format.
So what has to go? Where does Twenty20 get its space in the calendar? How do we give players the rest they need? How can we keep the interest in the game alive via TV revenues?
Well I’d have thought the answer would be simple, cancel the Champions Trophy.
It’s not a tournament steeped in tradition and it’s not a tournament viewed and revered across the globe. It’s a redundant fixture that adds unnecessary extra strain on players and schedules which fans invariably don’t care about.
Now we just need to convince the administrators and TV people that making slightly less profit will be better for everyone in the long term.
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