TOMORROW marks a critical day for the ICC Champions Trophy. Organisers based in London will pull back their curtains and pray that they are greeted by a clear blue sky. Australia are scheduled to play New Zealand at the Oval and a competition marked by poor interest and rain needs a proper contest to be yanked from its lethargy.
We are talking here about the second biggest event in one-day cricket. It will be the biggest earner for the winners outside the 2003 World Cup. Shane Warne, Sachin Tendulkar and Muttiah Muralitharan notwithstanding, it has brought the leading lights together in England for the last time until perhaps 2019.
And it will get better. Trust me. The point is that a showcase event six days in should be a cause for celebration, not a tournament in need of reassurance. Both the ECB, with risky scheduling and weak marketing, and the ICC, with unrealistic hopes for the lesser countries, have left themselves open to criticism.
Instead of deciding that the event should form the centrepiece of the summer, the ECB has made it a hostage to foul weather at the nub-end of the season. The schools are back, depriving a potential audience, and even the hardiest followers are reluctant to pay £25 to shiver their way through one-sided matches. Thus the empty grounds.
Then the board has erred by organising the four key group games on successive days at the end of stage one instead of threading them among the rest, as happened in Sri Lanka two years ago. It required a more attractive — and less contentious — opening than England against Zimbabwe. No performer would deflate his crowd by beginning a concert with a sequence of weak material.
Advertisement
The Twenty20 Cup showed what can be achieved with strong publicity when the will and the budget are there. Yet casual supporters attending maybe a day or two of Test cricket this season might know nothing about the Champions Trophy. Even the programme for the NatWest Challenge against India this month devoted only one of its 72 pages specifically to this competition. At least the low-profile matches occupy six days compared with almost a month in the World Cup last year. The 2007 event in the West Indies will feature 16 countries, all playing three games in the first stage.
Barring a huge improvement by Bangladesh or a political shift in Zimbabwe, there will be 20 matches with little or no bearing. The ICC must consider whether the interests of these two, along with Kenya and the United States, are best served by the beatings being inflicted. Ricky Ponting, the Australia captain, made a good point when he suggested after his team knocked off the 66 required to beat the United States on Monday that developing teams should prove themselves among themselves before exposure to the higher level.
Like Tolstoy’s analysis of unhappy families, the weakest four countries here are weak in different ways. Zimbabwe’s circumstances are uniquely tragic, and tragic is not too strong a word. They could be isolated from the one-day game as well as the Test arena within a month, depending on the outcome of the inquiry into racism in their union.
For Kenya, Test status is as far away as ever. The one-day internationals they needed to continue the momentum of last spring were never likely to materialise because the calendar is consumed by the ICC Future Tours Programme based on Test series. It is hard to feel confident for the US when the team include two players under 30, four aged 40 or over and only one born in the US.
Youthful Bangladesh are the opposite. Whatever the impression given against South Africa on Sunday, they are on a slight upturn. It is pertinent to consider Wisden’s verdict on another fledgling team from the sub-continent in the 1975 World Cup. “Completely out of their depth,” it reported after a nine-wicket defeat by West Indies. Twenty-one years later, Sri Lanka lifted the World Cup.
Advertisement
These countries need help. The US should be accommodated in the West Indies’ domestic game, Kenya in the competition in South Africa. The ECB has found a place for Scotland in the totesport League and Ireland could be added in 2006. Better a short step forward than a giant leap into a hole.