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The year is 2028, and the PA system is announcing the new batsman en route to the crease in Houston. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the crease, Hoosiers captain and Australian international, Chris Green!” The crowds at Moosa Stadium give a lukewarm response to the Hoosiers’ lower-order hitter, but cannot help singing along to his walk-on music: Kasabian’s classic rock song ‘Underdog’. Appreciative though they may be of his musical choices, they are willing him to fail: if he can help his team score the 38 runs they need from the final four overs, then they will jump the Ranchers into second place of the American League West and join the Stars in the Playoffs. If he’s to do it though, he’ll have to survive two overs of spin from the ambidextrous Prashanth Nair, whose unusual skillset has made him something of a global star having found game time in both India and Australia thanks to his excellent MLC performances. It doesn’t take him long to dismiss Green, but ultimately the seventh-wicket pair of Welsh international Nye Donald, and Green’s replacement: 28-year-old keeper Emmanuel Stewart, himself a Grenadian international, were able to find enough boundaries to make their 26-game regular season campaign a successful one. ESPN pundits John Davison and Jarrod Kimber spend half an hour in the studio analysing the match-ups between the Indy Hoosiers and their American League semi-final opponents, the Raleigh Oaks. Viewers are baffled when Kimber again makes reference to a man called “Ed Cowan” who apparently existed a long time ago. ========================================================================================= If this all seems farfetched, that is because it absolutely is. There is no 20-team Major League Cricket competition, and no Indy Hoosiers, Texan Ranchers or Raleigh Oaks exist anywhere other than the frankly excessive number of spreadsheets that clog my hard drive. And yet, every bit of this little anecdote is something that the ICC could, if the mood so took them, make possible. Twenty20 is doing its very best to drag cricket kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, much as Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket finally managed to drag it into the 20th in the late 1970s. It is the job of the game’s administrators to let it do so. At present, the Qualifier for the Twenty20 World Cup (the first edition to have been rebranded away from its original World Twenty20 moniker) is demonstrating a little of the potential that cricket really does have to grow. Countries like Namibia, Netherlands and Papua New Guinea have stamped themselves all over this tournament and look likely to finish as the top three teams involved, all of them ahead of Ireland who are (lest we forget) a Full Member nation. Talented cricketers come from all corners of the world these days. Not only that, but some very strong cricket teams weren’t even able to qualify for this tournament: the United States, able to draw upon a pace attack of Ali Khan, Rusty Theron and Cam Gannon, didn’t make it. Nor did Nepal, or Germany. Their absence, through no greater reason than the merit of those who qualified ahead of them (save possibly for Nigeria, who were the beneficiaries of Zimbabwe’s heavy-handed punishment for some even heavier-handed administrative fraudulence) goes only to show the huge depth that is beginning to develop in international cricket. So, naturally, the ICC intends to keep the main Twenty20 World Cup tournament at only twelve teams – even though Indian broadcaster Star has expressed an interest in an expanded format. And so, naturally, the ICC apparently intends to dispense with the tournament which has provided such riveting cricket in recent weeks. Doing away with this, a tournament that exposes players from relative cricketing backwaters to world-class facilities, officials and, often, opposition. Imagine instead, a 20-team World Twenty20 (sorry, the old name has just stuck for me). If the events of the last couple of weeks have shown us anything, it’s that there are definitely eight competitive Associate teams: look, for example at what Hong Kong achieved, even without the presence of their seven most talented eligible players. And look at what they achieved very recently against India. Imagine that World Cup with four groups of five that progress into knockouts that will be broadcast around the world to an audience of millions, possibly billions. No not that World Cup. A cricket one. Look what a well-run World Cup can achieve. Look at it. Imagine also an international game not ruled by a small cabal of elite teams. A governing body which operates independently; or, failing that, which at least gives equal voting rights to India as it does to their neighbours Nepal. Contrary to popular belief amongst Indian cricket administrators, the rest of the world won’t vote against the hand that feeds them just because they can: so great is India’s share of the cricketing audience and revenue that it is in everyone else’s interests to keep them strong and profitable too. Similarly, cricket has a few geographical quirks that do not exist in other sports. Take for example, the England cricket team. Or, as the name of its governing body suggests it should be called, the England and Wales cricket team. There is only one Welshman currently playing international cricket: Swansea-born Imad Wasim, for Pakistan. Although Sussex’s Phil Salt, who recently came moderately close to representing England, was born in North Wales, he is not so near the front of their queue to open the batting. The arguments against a Welsh national team, so long as it was supported by the ECB to the extent of allowing at least the historic Glamorgan County Cricket Club to continue fielding Welsh players as locals, are ill-founded; it would bring cricket into line with almost every other sport in Wales, and might even persuade the people of Wales to give a little bit more of a shit about cricket. Then there is the enduring curio that is the West Indies cricket team. Two-time World Champions in each of cricket’s limited-overs formats, the West Indies Cricket Board is in fact a composite organisation of more than a smaller national cricket boards. This has always been something of an uneasy alliance, but since the introduction of the Professional Cricket League in 2014, the situation has persisted in which a young cricketer in Jamaica will never actually be able to play cricket for his country; the PCL team is the Jamaica Scorpions, and has every right to just buy in a player from outside of Jamaica if they so fancy it. A Welsh cricket team has rarely been convened for more than the very occasional exhibition game. While many of those smaller cricket boards would struggle to produce strong teams (hi, Montserrat), there are still plenty of them who would be able to put together very strong national teams: if their representation in Twenty20 competitions around the world is any barometer, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad could still be world class forces. And so far, I have talked only about those cricketing markets which are already being tapped (just badly). The United States is oft-discussed as a potential goldmine, given its tendency to take seriously pretty much any sport that catches their attention. The difficulty that cricket will always have in the United States, though, is that there is already a competing bat-and-ball sport in the summer which has the advantage of being quite literally America’s pastime. In comparison to Major League Baseball, a hypothetical Major League Cricket would be courting the diaspora of generally-recognised cricket-playing nations and would likely aspire to the sorts of attendance figures of mid-range baseball Minor Leagues, and some rather niche TV deals. Regardless, though, the idea of an all-American cricket league is the ultimate pipedream of many an expansionist cricketing administrator. - - - Test cricket is extremely special; it is a unique spectacle that I would recommend to almost anyone else. If a Twenty20 league is the 20-episode television series, then Test cricket is the original bestselling novel that served as the source material for a more accessible interpretation. The novel, absolutely has its place. But plenty of people only know that the novel exists because the TV series caught their attention. Sometimes, a good TV series can bring mainstream attention to its parent novel. If we want to see the world play cricket, we need to show them the version of our game that has most grabbed people’s attention. And it doesn’t have to be the big, all-singing all-dancing Indian Premier League experience: anyone who has ever attended a night at England’s Twenty20 Blast competition can attest that it is a wonderful night out, and usually full to the rafters of kids getting into cricket. ========================================================================================= “And for the eighteenth overall pick in the 2028 Major League Cricket Draft, the Indy Hoosiers have selected Kairo Walker, of Wayne State University!” And just like that, the First Round draft pick becomes a star. Live on ESPN, anchor Jarrod Kimber turns to studio guest Timroy Allen, the former USA and San Fran Bridgers all-rounder Timroy Allen. Allen consults his notes; “Well, it says here on his profile that Walker is a talented young spin bowler. Apparently he first saw cricket in 2017 when he was on holiday in England, and has been interested ever since. He says that for some time afterwards, his mother really didn’t approve of cricket, especially once he started watching videos of Rashid Khan well into the night.” Kimber laughs, then asks, “Well I think I speak for everyone when I say we’ve all been there.” Former LA Celestials coach Daniel Vettori agrees, which reminds everyone else that he’s actually still in the studio. “Yeah, couldn’t agree more Jarrod,” he says, “In my time as a coach it was always a pleasure to coach him, but a nightmare to try to prepare to play against him. It – “ Jarrod cuts him off in order to cut back to the stage. “And now for the nineteenth overall pick in the 2028 Major League Cricket Draft, the Hollywood Stars have selected Nepal international Kushal Malla, who has made himself available for MLC for the first time.” - - - Many thanks to u/jachiche who persuaded me to get this article done at last. In the end, I started it from scratch again and in all honesty have no idea if this makes the point that I meant for it to. [link] [comments] |
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