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Four Years On, Nothing Changes

By Dave Tickner

With Michael Holding the latest to question the merits of including eight complete no-hopers in a 16-team tournament, the ICC's desire to run cricketers into the ground is once again under the spotlight.

Tristan Holme has already backed the minnows' right to play in the World Cup. He also pinpoints the ICC's reason for letting them; money.

The ICC may crack on about raising the game's profile outside its traditional heartlands, but inviting half-a-dozen teams made up of 35-year-old West Indian has-beens and never-weres to get thrashed every four years is not the way to go about it.

Does Bermudan cricket really benefit from a journeyman county player like David Hemp trying to help them avoid three utter annihalations on their World Cup debut?

Even Scotland, one of the traditional powerhouses of the ICC Trophy have two players in their ranks - Gavin Hamilton and Dougie Brown - who have already been found desperately short at international level in England colours.

Ireland, at least, boast a couple of potentially top-class young batsmen in Eoin Morgan and William Porterfield. But how long before they follow erstwhile team-mate Ed Joyce's path across the Irish Sea to achieve their career goals?

The success of Sri Lanka, and to a lesser extent pre-implosion Zimbabwe, shows that avenues must remain open for teams to crack the Test elite. On the rankings used for this World Cup, a 12-team tournament would still include Kenya and Scotland and would surely make more sense than including seven non-Test nations in what should be the game's showpiece event.

The only reason these teams are in the Caribbean is to extend a month-long, 30-game tournament into an eight-week marathon with over 50 games, many of them utterly pointless.

Twenty extra games equals a lot more ticket sales, you see.

The ICC long ago stopped caring about the damage their insane schedule is doing to the game, despite constant complaints from players and coaches.

The folly of a bloated one-day tournament was shown to stunning effect by England in Australia. Despite losing five of their first six CB Series fixtures, they won their last four to win the series with a 50 per cent win ratio. Australia's was 70 per cent.

While getting up for the 'big games' is a part of any major sport, England's triumph must surely put to bed the ludicrous system the Aussies use for the season-ending one-day junket. It's been threatening to hurt them for years, and has finally caught up with them. The first final was played in front of rows and rows of empty seats as even the sport-loving Aussie public turned their noses up at yet another one-day international.

And it's seriously hampered the holders' World Cup chances as injuries mount and fatigue takes hold.

But the problem is not confined to Australia, or to one-day cricket, as more and more international cricket is played as traditional seasons blur into a never-ending 12-month cycle.

New Zealand's victory over Australia in Hamilton was the 2527th ODI since the shorter game's inception in 1971. Almost 1,000 of those (996 to be precise - around two-fifths of the total) have been played this decade.

Test cricket has been in existence for 130 years. But more than one in six of the 1830 Tests in that period have been played since 2000. Of the 43 members of Test cricket's 100-cap club, 25 played in this millennium; 16 of them have played Test cricket in the last 12 months.

When will the ICC learn that, in cricket as in life, less is often more? The evidence is there, and not just in the CB Series.

The Stone Roses recorded just two albums; The La's only one. To date, Westlife have released eight.

Fawlty Towers and The Office have fewer than 30 episodes between them. Yet there are 127 episodes of My Family and Two Pints of Lager clogging up the BBC archives.

By cutting four teams from the competition and leaving three groups of four followed by a Super Six, the World Cup could be cut to 33 games at a stroke. Ditch the semi-finals and you've got 31, a saving of 20 games.

Bermuda, Ireland, Canada and Holland have a lot to do in the Caribbean to convince me they are there for anything other than an extra 20 games' revenue in the ICC coffers.