ICC must act now to stop T20Is losing all relevance
Tim Wigmore looks at a huge paradox in the modern game that must be resolved to expand the sport for its associates
The Indian fans slouched against the fences separating them from the outfield at the Wankhede Stadium, unable to quite comprehend what they had witnessed. They were immobile for several minutes, as if to leave the stadium would involve accepting the finality of their defeat.
It was March last year, and the West Indies had just pulled off one of the great heists in the history of T20 cricket, clearing India’s total of 192 to qualify for the final of the World T20.
I thought about this scene in Kanpur last week. Once again, India lost a home T20I. But while their defeat a year earlier had been marked by anguish and disbelief, here it was met with little more than a shrug. Fans made their getaways long before England’s victory was confirmed, and no one seemed remotely perturbed by witnessing India’s defeat.
The contrast between these two defeats reflects all that is wrong with international T20 cricket. While the WT20 is a magnificent event, short and leaden with jeopardy, with huge consequences for victory and defeat, the rest of international T20 is a curious, and unloved beast. It rolls on, unfathomable and impossible to assign any great meaning to.
The norm is for a one or two-match series, tacked on to the end of a tour when everyone has thoughts of home.
No one ascribes any importance to the world rankings, so bilateral T20Is are a prime chance to rest players, stress-testing others for international cricket; India, indeed, rested both Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja for the series against England.
Besides the WT20, genuine fullblooded matches between two teams at full strength are lamentably rare: bilateral T20Is simply don’t matter, and no one has the inclination to pretend that they do.
Before the series in India, England captain Eoin Morgan was asked a pertinent question by a local journalist: what, exactly, was the point of it all? Morgan gave the answer a good go, but was reduced to claiming the threegame T20I series was good preparation for the Champions Trophy: that is, a different format of the game, played in completely different conditions that was over four months away.
The effect was to highlight the huge need for T20Is to be imbued with meaning. There is a curious paradox in the international game today: T20Is are watched by the highest audiences, yet treated with the least care by cricket’s governing elite.
In India, cricket’s economic powerhouse and the sport’s beating heart, as many people watch a single T20 game as watch 20 hours of Test cricket. By failing to imbue T20Is with meaning, international cricket is effectively at risk of giving domestic T20 competitions a free run, and establish themselves as the pinnacle of T20 cricket.
Go down this path, and the consequences could be huge: the victory of club over country, leading inexorably to domestic players being paid more, a spate of premature retirements from international cricket – as already seen in the West Indies – and the overall international game, Tests and ODIs as well as T20Is, being diminished in quality and relevance.
There is, at least, a growing awareness of these risks within the ICC. But while the ICC has often been good at identifying the weaknesses in the international game, it has seldom been able to go very far in solving them – largely because of the myopia, short-termism and self-interest of the Full Members, above all the Big Three (India, England and Australia), who hold all the power. This time, it must be different.
The ICC’s solution to the irrelevance of T20I cricket is two-fold. First, restore the WT20 to being every two years. During the Big Three takeover of the ICC in 2014, the WT20 was ludicrously moved from being every two years to every four, largely to create yet more time for the Big Three to play each other.
There is a growing appetite for the WT20 to return in 2018, and on a twoyear cycle thereafter. The only snag is that the ICC will have to accept TV rights that are less lucrative than they would like, the product of a commercial rights deal (designed, of course, by the Big Three) that guaranteed Star Sports first refusal on any new ICC events within the 2015-23 rights cycle. Still, getting less extra cash than they would like should be no reason for the ICC not to agree to the 2018 tournament, which is likely to be held in South Africa.
The ICC’s second, and more radical, proposal is to introduce a 13-team league for T20I cricket. This would involve all countries playing one threegame series against all the other teams over a three-year cycle – that is, 36 games over three years. The games would count towards a league table, producing a champion and also relegation, thereby creating interest at the top and bottom end. If the solution is not perfect – three years is longer than an international T20 league would ideally take – it is infinitely preferable to the hotchpotch of matches that currently pass for bilateral T20I cricket.
And it would mean that, rather than being preparation for a tournament in another format, England’s T20I series in India could instead be a shoot-out between two of the league leaders, vying for supremacy and ultimately to win the title.
Such a shift could also be transformative for viewing figures, especially towards the end of the cycle. If, say, a series between England and Sri Lanka impacted upon India’s
T20Is are watched by the highest audiences yet treated with the least care by cricket’s governing elite
chances of winning the crown, it could lead to a sizeable increase in viewing figures in India; as no one cares about the T20I rankings, and nor should they, Indian fans currently have no reason to care for bilateral T20Is involving other teams.
And the changes would also be transformative for Associate nations. T20 is the format most suited to cricket’s globalisation, even if it would be a grave mistake to limit Associates to this format. A 13-team league would provide three Associates with a guaranteed 36 matches in the league structure, providing them with a body of confirmed fixtures to sell to sponsors and commercial partners, and a chance to win new fans in their own nations and throughout the cricketing world.
Just as importantly, the matches would allow the top Associates the opportunity to hone their skills and improve, ultimately becoming more competitive and adding to the depth and vitality of global cricket. This is what those, like Mickey Arthur recently, who advocate T20I cricket being scrapped outside of the WT20 too readily forget: T20Is represent the best tool cricket has for expanding. But fans need a reason to care for the matches, just like they do in domestic T20 leagues, which all produce a champion over a clearly defined timeframe.
At its best, T20I cricket is a brilliant format, and capable of creating moments, like that Caribbean assault on India at Mumbai last year, that defy the transience of the format. But for too long they have been devalued by a lack of context. There would be no better time for that to change than at the ICC’s quarterly meeting in Dubai this month.