Trimming the ICC cricket World Cup for the Australia/New Zealand edition of the even in 2015 shouldn’t be a fait accompli. Ignore the whipping of Kenya inside 30 overs by the Kiwis and Canada’s capitulation against Sri Lanka, please!
The Kenyans have met Test-strength opposition just once in the past two years, apparently. Hardly enough meaningful cricket to enable them to compete properly at the ICC’s flagship event.
The Canucks, as the Toronto Star labelled the Canadian team, had their loss reported in the newspaper – nice to see.
Rick Westhead, the Star’s South Asia correspondent dealt with the story, and handled it well.
He did linger, however, on the fact that it took five hours for Canada to get to have a bat, timing the start of the match from the coin toss.
“They will be challenged to collect the three wins necessary to advance into the event’s second round,” Westhead wrote.
“When a Sri Lankan marksman beat the veteran John Davison, crashing the ball into the wickets, you could sense the wind being sucked out of the Canadians’ sails.”
In the end, Westhead almost judged that the television commercials between overs and wickets falling were the ultimate highlight of the day.
Over at Nairobi’s Daily Nation, Firdrose Monda said the Kenyans were already denying “rifts” in the team (never a good sign two days into a tournament, surely) after the New Zealand loss.
“Even Kenya’s most skilled batsmen looked uncomfortable and out of place,” Monda wrote.
“We’ll work on it,” was captain Jimmy Kamande’s response.
The ICC’s decision to eliminate the Associates in 2015 and revert to 10 Test-only nations will be a disaster for cricket as an international sport.
Why even have the ICC pour money into promoting cricket in far-flung countries if they have nothing to aspire to?
The buzz of being at a World Cup shouldn’t be denied on performance – if it was, FIFA might as well rub out more than two-thirds of its own World Cup qualifying games.
However, in the eyes of the ICC, world cricket stops at rung 10 of an already sawn-off ladder. That’s not going to mean a true World Cup worthy of the name when the team planes touch down in Sydney and Auckland in four years’ time.
The ICC in fact has altered the World Cup format no less than six times in the past 30 years. Is any other international sporting body that mad? In the same period (1975-2010) the FIFA World Cup has changed three times – and grown each time, too.
The cricketing version has gone from eight teams, to nine, 12, 14, 16 and now it’s back to 14.
The cull to 10 will make the ICC’s own investment in developing cricket world-wide look completely irrelevant.
If the ICC insist on 10 countries, at least offer a window to the second-tier nations via a play-off series between the bottom two ODI-ranked sides and the best six Associates – the top two from that qualifying tournament could each have a place at the big table.
Sure, cricket may never be as big as rugby union or the world game, but it will hardly be memorable either if 10 countries play alone, year-in, year-out.
One onlne poster to CricInfo.com put it well all the way back in October when the idea was first mooted – yes, FIFA could arrange a World Cup containing just the top five teams from Europe and five from South America, but it doesn’t.
Why? Because it wouldn’t be a World Cup!
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