Greetings, fellow Roarers. I’ve been absent from your screens for a week. A fair bit has happened: Ricky Ponting steps down, replaced by Michael Clarke, a couple of drawn AFL games get that familiar debate going, the ICC World Cup is over for another four years, and my lovely wife gave birth to our first child, a girl.
I can tell you which of the four moments provided me with the most joy. And which was the least enjoyable of all (the most was our baby, obviously!). The least joyful was the decision this week by the ICC to at first hint at a 12-team World Cup for 2015 before simply rubber-stamping the original 10-team idea, first mooted before the 2011 edition even began.
Only it’s now gone from bad to worse. The initial chance for Associate-level nations to participate via a qualifying competition has been scrapped for a Test-team only World Cup. Even the inaugural tournament in 1975 included East Africa and Sri Lanka – both Associates.
It is an absolutely disgusting, disgraceful, shameful and outrageous decision from the ICC, and it supposedly had Cricket Australia backing, too.
What more could Ireland do? Honestly? The fuming reaction from the country’s players and administrators is totally fair and understandable.
Irish cricket CEO Warren Deutrom told the Irish Independent’s Rory Dollard on April 5 that the Emerald Isle men “won’t be taking this [ICC decision] lying down.”
“We will continue to fight this and we don’t believe this is a dead issue yet… I don’t believe the ICC or its directors would act in an illegal fashion but we have to determine whether or not what has transpired is in the best interests of the sport [and] the principles of sport… I have worked in the ICC for the best part of eight or nine years, first as part of the management and now sitting on one of the two senior committees and I can say that today I am ashamed to be part of that apparatus.”
Ireland coach Phil Simmons was equally scathing on the same day at CricInfo.com: “It is hard to find words to describe this despicable decision made by some who want to keep things among themselves and some who fear us.”
I’d say he’s right on both counts.
The clanging madness against the ICC’s move continued with the Irish skipper William Porterfield putting his two (Euro) cents in.
“It is every player’s dream to play at and win a World Cup,” said the captain.
“Everyone in the cricketing world can see they are shutting the door on not only a lot of players, but also on the development of world cricket.”
“It’s not just about Ireland,” Porterfield added.
“This could mean the death of cricket in a lot of countries – and all because a few full members are looking to make a few extra quid from the competitions. How they can turn around, shut out half the world and still call themselves a world governing body is an absolute joke.”
His words, not mine. Once again, the ICC has to intolerably tinker with something. FIFA’s World Cup has gone from 16 teams to 24 and 32. It would be inconceivable that they’d cull it back to 24 in 2018 and 2022. Cricket has returned to nothing but an exclusive gentleman’s club – I thought this was 2011, not 1911.
Call the 2015 series whatever you like, but it will not be a World Cup worthy of the title. It will be a Champions Trophy and nothing more. According to reports this week, the 2019 edition scheduled for England will also include 10 teams, but with a possible play-off between the bottom two Test sides and top six Associates.
It will be way too little, way too late. After the best part of a decade with nothing to play for, the likes of Ireland and Holland will simply not bother to promote the sport, and why should their respective publics get involved or interested when even improved performances in 2011 seem to warrant a cull?
For all its administrative faults, at least FIFA’s motto remains “for the good of the game” – an acknowledgment that the sport’s popularity does not simply reside in the five best nations in Europe and South America. If it did, the colloquial moniker “the world game” would hardly apply.
I maintain that a 12-team cricket World Cup (two groups of six, quarters, semis, final, all completed within a month with two games a day during the first phase) is my preferred option. Number two (at an absolute pinch) would have been 10 teams but with the top six Associates playing off against the bottom two Test teams for spots 9 and 10.
And all this comes after what I thought was an India-Sri Lanka final that (to me as a TV viewer) seemed to lack any real sense of occasion. India’s win – in light of the organisers saying a week out from the tournament that they’d floated the quarter-final fixtures and venues to ensure the Indians would get home games regardless of where they finished in the group stages – probably only confirmed the murmurs of discontent around the way the game has been run in recent times.
The footage I saw on Channel Nine was simply India versus Sri Lanka for the umpteenth time in the last two years or whatever at a stadium that was hardly India’s largest. It looked like just another group stage match, really. There was no excitement left for the neutrals – no feeling that any one of the top 10 teams entered could have been there on Cup final day.
Sure, the ICC is not FIFA, but it’s worth the expansion just so we see a few extra teams at the business end. Before anyone thinks I am a bleating loser, the fact that Australia didn’t make the 2011 final was neither here nor there for me. Personally, a New Zealand-South Africa, New Zealand-Pakistan or even England-West Indies decider would have arguably been just as (if not more) atmospheric in Mumbai.
As a cricketing nut, this all just makes me feel so sad for the great sport we love. Right now it feels like the ICC stands for Incredibly Careless Con-artists. The administrative body has pulled the wool over the eyes of fans and players alike across the globe, and must be held accountable over the next eight years.
I was so looking forward to a sensibly-run World Cup in 2015 (and 2019). I am now reconsidering how much support I now give the tournament when it arrives in Australia/New Zealand. I was planning on going to a game in either Melbourne or Adelaide. Maybe I will not now. Cricket Australia and the ICC don’t deserve my money at the gate if this is how they choose to treat the sport’s apparently most prestigiously-named event.
Boo-hiss, boo-hiss, etc!
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