Administration by vaps
Published on Aug 2, 2015, 9:07 pm AST
CAPTAINED WEST INDIES AT WORLD CUP: Jason Holder
As longtime participants in the wheeling and dealing that passes for the administration of the international game, the West Indies Cricket Board can have no complaints about their men’s team’s likely exclusion from the next Champions Trophy in 2017.
There shouldn’t be another Champions Trophy, but that’s another story for later in this piece. With only the top eight on the International Cricket Council’s official One-Day International rankings at September 30 this year qualifying for the event, the West Indies need to get a few ODI wins under their belt before the cut-off date to move ahead of eighth-ranked Pakistan.
However a proposed tri-nation series in Zimbabwe later this month involving the hosts and Pakistan has apparently fallen through. Obviously the Pakistanis don’t want to jeopardise their ranking by losing to the closest challengers. So now they won’t be participating, the series is off and the WICB is supposedly on the hunt for opponents to try to earn the regional side vital points before the deadline.
There has been talk of an approach to the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the same BCCI who are seeking US$42 million in compensation from the Caribbean administrators for the West Indies team’s abandonment of the tour of India last October.
Even if the Indians – who now effectively run the international game in collusion with England and Australia – were to choose to help the WICB, it assumes that the team that hasn’t played a single ODI since being thrashed by New Zealand in the quarter-finals of the World Cup on March 21, and which won just four of 11 previous one-dayers for the year, would be able to get the better of one of the more accomplished teams in the world.But that really isn’t the issue. What all of this foolish merely highlights is how dysfunctional and haphazard the structure of international cricket is, to the extent that one team can pull out of a competition and another can try to desperately invent a bi-lateral contest, both for no reasons other than narrow self-interest.
In a proper international sport, governed on the presumption of consistency and equality, there would be a proper schedule of fixtures involving every team playing the same number of matches against the same number of opponents in seeking to qualify for a particular competition.
This is cricket though, a sport that operates on the basis of superiority, where the strong ensure the weak bow to their will and a concept like the “good of the game†or a desire for competitiveness across the board is rendered subservient to the short-sighted rush for as much revenue as the big fish can swallow.
Last week the ICC’s chief executive, David Richardson, painted a grim picture. “Apart from series such as the Ashes and series between India and the top Full Members, many bilateral series are perceived as having little relevance,†said the former South African wicket-keeper. “Attendances in most series, especially for Test cricket, have fallen and the revenues generated from these series are not growing.â€
All of which is the inevitable consequence of the ICC’s facilitation of its most powerful members arranging things to suit themselves and leave the lower-ranked sides to scramble for the crumbs.
Unless there is a real revolution somewhere on the horizon, that gap between the haves and have-nots is only going to widen to the point where anything not involving the top three or four nations will be utterly meaningless. By the way, don’t cry for the West Indies, the former undisputed champions of the game for 15 years and without question the most consistently awesome force ever unleashed on the sport. If we end up being crumpled together with the other low-rankers and cast into the waste-basket of a second tier for international cricket it’s only what we deserve for failing to use our strength on the field for so long to demand fairness in the administration of the sport.
Now, instead of edging upward after so long in the lower reaches, we find the likes of Bangladesh getting uncomfortably close. Yes Bangladesh, a team that has been deliberately starved of international cricket in comparison to all the other Full Members of the ICC in the nearly 15 years since attaining Test status.
Oh, as for the Champions Trophy itself, that tournament was supposed to have been discontinued after the 2013 competition in England. But India won it, on a rain-soaked day in Birmingham when officials bent the rules to accommodate a 20-over-a-side match with the hosts to deflect condemnation for not scheduling a reserve day for the final.
If anything neatly summarises the administration by vaps that defines international cricket, it is the Champions Trophy, for which we are likely to be left out but are really eminently qualified.
