Kenya Cricket

The idea of a World Test Championship has finally been accepted by the ICC several years after it was first mooted. 

At present, it is something of a notional championship, as it does not include a specific tournament, but is awarded on the basis of existing fixtures.

Whether you think this is a good or bad thing may be influenced by your perception of the integrity of individual series and your faith in the ICC among other issues, but one of the issues it fails to address is the competitiveness of cricket at the highest level.

Since the addition of Bangladesh to the Test-playing ranks—some would say far too soon and with political ends in mind—there has been concern that they, and Zimbabwe in particular, are just not sufficiently competitive to warrant Test status.

Indeed, all of the other Full Member ICC countries treat the two newcomers that way; rarely have they been offered a Test series of more than two matches by any opponent because the disparity in performance leads to one-sided games and to fewer people interested in watching.

Instead of addressing this, the ICC have regularly mandated that each Test-playing Nation will be required to face each of the others, home and away, over a set period; this is commonly known as the Future Tours Programme (FTP) and has drawn the ire of various cricketing bodies in the past, notably the West Indies in 2005.

From April 2011, the updated FTP will effectively form the structure for the new World Test Championship and will run for four years, with a playoff at the end of it.

In many ways this will not affect the existing structure of tours, but it is likely to show what we already know: That Bangladesh are well adrift of the other current Test Nations.

Rather than ingraining this within the fabric of a Test Championship, it might be more worthy for funds to be found (perhaps from the multi-millionaire BCCI) for the development of cricket in the Associate Nations? 

The existing World Cricket league provides a framework for this, but is limited because it works on the one-day format.

The outcomes from this could be enhanced by establishing greater financial rewards, the use of improved facilities in Test-nation countries and the offer of A-sides from all the Test-playing countries, to make regular tours of the Associate Nations to provide high-quality opposition for developing cricket nations. 

It would be relatively easy for the ECB to send teams to Kenya, Denmark and Canada to play competitive four-day fixtures and one-day matches against the best that those nations have to offer—after all, it was only recently that A teams were being sent to compete in the West Indies First Class competition.

The BCCI could do something similar in Afghanistan, Holland and the United Arab Emirates, for example, and the focus would be on getting the developing nations up to speed in four day cricket as well as on-day games.

At the same time, instead of having away series’ in India and Australia, Bangladesh (and Zimbabwe when they return to Test cricket) should only host these teams and should make more use of regular games against the top Associate Members. 

This might see Bangladesh having a three match series of four-day games against Ireland and Scotland one year, then against Holland and Denmark the next. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe could do the same against Kenya and Namibia in the first year then Canada and the USA the second.

These could be hosted and funded by one of top nations, so that the Associate Member doesn’t have to worry about financing it or one of the major boards could sponsor the events in any of these countries.

At the moment, there is little hope for the progression of the Associate Members.

They don’t get the opportunity to face competitive opposition on a regular basis in order to improve, and don’t have the finances to fund expansion of the four-day game (for example, to get part-time players the necessary time off work). They're also being forced out of the next World Cup, with the sop of being offered additional places in the World T20 instead.

Surely, some of this responsibility should lie with the rich, Test-playing countries? The vision of the ICC must be to spread the game around the world and to do it in a manner that provides a good standard of cricket, rather than hoping for amateurism to break through.

Taking a step back from the focus on the Test-playing countries to allow the development of the Associate Members would be an ideal first step on this road.

The decision by the ICC to reduce the number of teams competing in the 2015 Cricket World Cup from 14 to 10 has drawn a reasonable amount of comment, both positive and negative, but surely it is the wrong solution to the correct identification of the problems with the current and recent formats of the competition.

The Cricket World Cup has been through seemingly endless variations of format already, and given that we are now only witnessing the tenth tournament the lack of consistency can hardly be helpful.

The number of teams in the competition began at eight, and for the first four tournaments (1975-1987) the format was largely the same: two groups of four with Semi-finals and a Final.  By 1992, the tournament was expanded to five weeks and nine teams (to include the newly-reinstated South Africans), and the first round was a single group round robin.

The 2003, 2007 and 2011 World Cup tournaments have averaged more than 50 matches per tournament, have each taken more than six weeks, and have included 14 or 16 teams competing.

Clearly, the tournament has now become bloated, and both the time span and number of matches involved is becoming a turn-off for fans of the game.  As Mike Holmans notes, the problem with the current tournament is that unless one of the Associate Nations has a particularly good run, we know who is expected to make the Super Eights, and the group stage matches have little relevance to the overall tournament, and he correctly points out that “This does not augur well for drama: it's just about certain that by the time we get to the group match between Sri Lanka and Australia in three weeks time, for instance, there will only be bragging rights at stake.”

The ICC seems to have realised this, but their response, rather than reducing the number of games that are meaningless, has been to reduce the number of teams involved, removing the Associate Nations from the World Cup entirely.  The only previous occasion when no Associate Members were permitted in the tournament was 1992.  Despite criticism, the ICC appear to be sticking with their decision.

The proponents of a World Cup focused solely on the Full Member Nations argue that the disparity in performance between them and the Associate Members is so wide that having the smaller teams at the World Cup provides little benefit.  Ricky Ponting is on the record as stating that the World Cup will be a better event without them.

Ponting also indicated that he thinks that these teams don’t learn much when they “are getting hammered”, but this seems to discount the efforts of Kenya in 2003 reaching the Semi-finals, and Ireland in 2007, both of whom ejected more illustrious opponents from the competition, showing that the Associate Members are not just there to get a hammering.

Naturally, the Associate Members themselves are less than happy about the decision, and have questioned the ICC’s thinking.  The decision was made by a Working Party that included Full Member representation, but nobody from the Associate Member Nations.  Although they have been given additional places in the World T20 tournament instead, many, including England spinner Graeme Swann, feel that taking them out of the World Cup lessens the appeal of the tournament as a global one.

Abhilash Mudaliar makes a good point about the competitiveness of individual matches and the need for highlight games to be scheduled accordingly, but shies away from the crux of the argument: the problem with the World Cup is not the lack of competitive games being played, it is the number of meaningless games, and there is a distinct difference: under the current format, most of these meaningless games are between the Full Member Nations, not games involving the Associate Members, because the games involving the Associate Members are the only opportunities we will have to see if there is an outside chance of one of them making the second stage.  All the games between Full Members are basically just jockeying for position in the latter stages.

The solution? Rather than reducing the number of teams to 10, the ICC should return to a 16-team format, with four groups of four where each team plays the others in their group once.  The top two qualify for the Quarter-finals.  We ditch the Super-eight stage.

This has the advantage of reducing the tournament to 31 games, which it should be possible to play in under a month.  It allows for six Associate Members. It means that every game is vital, even in the group stages.  It still gives the Test Nations the best chance of qualifying for the latter stages because the groups can be seeded, yet an Associate Nation may only need one victory over a Full Member Nation to advance.

The format worked very well for FIFA’s World Cups between 1958 and 1978 and is still the basis for the 32-team FIFA World Cup.

Given the strength of feeling on this and the recent progression from some of the Associate Nations, it seems a retrograde step to exclude them from future World Cups, when the problems that have arisen from the last two tournaments can be solved so simply.

(Sung by Steve Tikolo and his band of miserly men to the tune of Bryan Adams’ "Summer of '69")

We got no real sixes 
Bought it against a Kiwi side

Tried to bat but we just bled

Was the summer of 69 
Me and the guys from Kenya 
Obanda six and Tikolo a brace

Shoulda known we’d never get far

 Oh when we look back now 

That summer seemed to last forever 
And if  we had the choice 
Yeah – we’d always wanna be there 
These  are the best days of our lives 
Ain’t no use in complainin’ 
When you got a job to do 
Spent our evenin’s down at the nets 
And that’s when we met Kiwi men,yeah 
Standin’ on the dressing room porch 
The procession seemed to stretch forever 
Oh and when the Kiwis held our catches

We knew that it was now or never 
Those were the best days of our lives 
Back in the summer of '69 
Man we were killin’ time 
We were young and restless 
We needed to unwind 
I guess nothin’ can last forever – forever, no, yeah 
And now the times are changin’ 
Look at everything that’s come and gone 
We got no real sixes 
We think about it now, wonder what went wrong 
Standin’ on the dressing room porch 
Why did it last forever?

Oh when the Kiwis held our catches 
We knew that it was now or never 
These are the best days of our lives, oh yeah 
Back in the summer of 69, uh-huh 
It was the summer of 69, o yeah, me n my team for 69

It was the summer, the summer, summer of 69

Quote of the day: 
Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special. – Fran Lebowitz