ICC gives overnight international T20 status to 86 members; Cricket body stumps the game like never before

History of sports is as interesting as the history of mankind. Any sport evolves over time by riding factors of historical importance. A catastrophe like a world war or a political crisis at times catapults a sporting discipline to an unbelievable height and even makes its contribution towards peace memorable.

Though the sport is mostly considered a non-serious aspect of human life, sometimes it becomes too serious to be ignored for a role in the history of the advancement of human civilisation. That’s the paradox and also the beauty of sports.

Football is an example which fits this bill perfectly. The advancement of the game has been facilitated by glorious achievements like World Cup football as well as by devastating events like the world wars besides other political and technical factors. Pioneered by the same British who also invented cricket, football saw an ascendancy in the history of world sports like none other has and it could successfully do so because it grew a natural growth and absorbed things as they came by for its own good.

Anything to be called cricket from now on?

Take the recent decision of the International Cricket Council (ICC) of granting international T20 playing status to all its 104 members, in contrast. The ICC’s decision would mean any T20 match played between any of its 104 members would be considered an international game. Did the international cricket body just kill the gold-egg-laying duck?

86 new teams ready for international cricket?

The ICC’s decision lacks sense and sensitivity towards cricket and in a way, cripples the game’s future. If the ICC really had considered all its 104 member teams fit for playing international games all these days, we wouldn’t have been seeing the same 9-10 countries playing each other around the year, making it one of the dullest sports in terms of diversity.

Not Test but T20 is cricket’s ultimate saviour

But yet the ICC increased the number of qualified teams from 18 to 104 – a move which is perhaps unprecedented in the history of any game on this planet. It has been said that the decision was aimed at globalising the game.

So, in a way, we have decided that cricket can’t really be globalised in its purest form. Instead, we can manage it with a version which is shallow and hardly a game where the ball matches the bat and spectators witness a balanced battle being fought on the 22 yards. The idea is accepted because it mints money in a lesser time (remember a four-day Test between Zimbabwe and South Africa last year?).

Though projected under the leadership of the British like football, cricket wasn’t as dominant a game as the former historically. Football was played by countries where the British did not have direct rule and influence as such like in Europe and South America while football was less prominent in those countries where the British had direct power and influence and cricket was more popular there – played by immigrants or embraced by the local elites.

The globalisation of football happened fast and one of the reason was the quick professionalism that grew with the game and the laying down of fewer and simple rules. Football’s advantage is that it requires only one ball and a field and anybody with a talented pair of legs can do the rest.

FIFA presidents like Sir Stanley Rous did football a favour by improving the technical aspects like rules of the game and awarding world cup hosting rights years in advance while his successor Joao Havelange made it truly global by going for junior tournaments that uncovered a reserve of talents from Africa which also saw foreign coaches making inroads there, eventually helping football to grow internationally.

ICC hasn’t done anything worthwhile for cricket; it has only wasted time

We haven’t seen any such move in cricket even though the ICC is just five years junior to the FIFA (in 1909 when it was formed, the ICC was known as the Imperial Cricket Conference).

The ICC has essentially remained a wrestling club dominated by bureaucrats where clashes of ego and execution of personal ambitions of influence have been at the centre-stage. The decisions that the ICC take today reflect a sense of confusion and the one to grant mass international status was clearly of desperation. The commercialisation is the ultimate motive for the ridiculous decisions that the cricket’s governing body takes – often self-contradictory.

If more teams are in for T20Is; why fewer teams in 50-over WC?

If the ICC indeed wants a truly globalised cricket featuring 104 international T20 teams, why did it then restrict the number of participants for the 2019 Cricket World Cup to 10? Does that mean the 86 newcomers (besides six minnows that can play T20 internationals besides 12 full members) are deft in playing T20 cricket but not many among them are wise enough to play the 50-over format?

This selling of cricket after categorising it is as insane as it sounds. One gets a feeling that the ICC has started giving up hope over the longest formats (even though Afghanistan and Ireland have been given the permission to play in Tests) and is banking on T20s as the only way forward for the game which has no less a glorious past than football.

There can be no reservation against globalisation of cricket as, without decentralisation, it has no future to look to. Cricket has survived far too long with too few sides playing against each other each other endlessly, making its dimension a predictable one. But that globalisation has to happen through a natural process and not by means of steroids. The drastic approval of 86 nations as international T20-playing ones is nothing but a forced one, looking for an artificial surge in the game’s fortunes.

These new teams could have been made regular hosts instead

The ICC would have done a better act by making these new teams hosts of T20 tournaments as that would have allowed the game to reach far-off places without actually getting slain for newer participants and audiences to get familiar with the ‘international’. The hosts could gradually find themselves associated with it: as countries like Bangladesh and the UAE have done by playing a more notable host to international cricket first. But if these countries do not have the infrastructure to host games, then forget about their ability to play it with the required skills. The ICC has indeed exhibited a paucity of thought.

What’s coming? Comedy, boredom or tragedy?

Asking 86 freshers besides six minnows to play the game will see such debacle that from initial reaction of amusement, it will only lead to boredom and an eventual disappointment. The top tier teams – a hopeless minority – will also feel after a point of time that the entire exercise is futile.

The ICC has said once the new system comes into play and a ranking system gets implemented, smaller nations will feel motivated to compete with the best and the results will improve their ranking. Well, they can be motivated to a point of utter demotivation no doubt but we are not sure about the improvement in rankings.

How many low-ranked teams in football give a Brazil and Germany a run for their money and improve their rankings? And how many times, does an India play, say a Spain in football after feeling motivated? Apart from the fact that it is democratised, the FIFA point system only makes the invisible walls in the world of football evident. If you are beyond 30-40, you don’t matter.

In cricket, A for Argentina, Z for Zambia

The inclusion of a colourful atlas in the world of cricket makes it interesting nonetheless. If we see an Argentina playing Chile in T20 (by the way, did you know when the Argentines had played their South American neighbours in cricket in the late 19^th century, they had crossed the Andes atop mules to reach Santiago over half a week?) we will be eager to see those matches just we were when Kenya bowled to Sachin Tendulkar in their first World Cup game in 1996 but the purpose of the exercise gets over at that very point.

Also, most of these new teams have players from Asian origins who took the game across geographical borders. Biologically, the game still belongs to the Asian subcontinent and only it will rule it in terms of money and statistics. Whatever extra work the ICC is doing for the game’s globalisation to mint more money than anything else is only for the gallery to see.

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