domestic game will miss out on khan
Tim Wigmore on why county cricket will be robbed of seeing one of the game’s rising stars this summer
What a delight it has been to see Rashid Khan, the first Afghan to play in the Indian Premier League, excel in this year’s tournament. In his first five matches Khan got nine wickets at an average of 16.11 and frugal economy rate of 7.25 – even more impressive considering that he has often bowled in the death overs. And he even hit his only ball for six against Kings XI Punjab – a match-winning blow, given that Sunrisers Hyderabad won that match by five runs.
Khan is a compelling sight, a leg-spinner unlike any other in the IPL. He is unusually quick – able to bowl over 60mph – and able to generate sizeable bounce. He has a particularly delicious googly, which claimed both Brendon McCullum and Aaron Finch during a spell of 3-19 against the Gujarat Lions. Such has been his impact that ESPNCricinfo even declared that the “$600,000 he was bought for may have been a bargain”.
If Afghanistan are cricket’s coming storm, then Khan is now their flagbearer: a cricketer worthy of comparison to any other in Twenty20 cricket, where he is ranked the world’s number five and, as he showed against England Lions and Ireland this winter, formidable in first-class cricket, too. He is shaping up to be Afghanistan’s first genuinely great cricketer.
What a shame, then, that county cricket fans will not be able to see him – or Mohammad Nabi, the other Afghan to play in this year’s IPL – anytime soon. That’s because of the ludicrous eligibility rules for overseas players in county cricket, devised by the Home Office and ECB together. The Home Office Test is that all foreigners in UK sport must be internationally established at the highest level; it is a curious definition of this that excludes the fifth best T20I bowler in the world.
This is discrimination of the worst sort, depriving a player of the chance to play county cricket not because of how good he is, but where he’s from: if the best cricketer in the world happened to be in a nation without Full Member status, there is nothing they could do to qualify. It shows the worst of the Home Office, and reflects terribly on the ECB that they have not pushed for a sensible alternative.
If the rule is to exist at all – and really it should not, because counties should be left to judge whether players are good enough themselves – then the criteria should be changed, away from judging players based on what status their countries happen to have, and towards judging them on their world rankings.
And yet Khan probably won’t mind too much: like Nabi, he is off to this year’s Caribbean Premier League, which clashes with the Natwest Blast. England’s domestic cricket would be enriched by their presence – not just in T20 cricket, but also in the first-class game, where Khan could be a season-changing signing for a county, given how unused batsmen in the shires are to 60mph legspin, as he proved with match figures of 12/122 against a strong Lions side in Dubai in December.
What a shame that ridiculous discriminatory rules get in the way of allowing talent to flourish in England.
Petty Politics...
After years of running scared from Associates, it is brilliant to see Zimbabwe touring Europe this summer. In June they will tour Scotland and the Netherlands, playing Scotland in two 50-over games and the Dutch in three. It will be no surprise if, for all their cash that Full Member status brings, Zimbabwe do not turn out to be any better than the two Associates.
Yet, bizarrely, while Zimbabwe’s games with Scotland will be full one-day internationals, their matches with the Netherlands will only be List A games – even though the Dutch lead the World Cricket League Championship table, above Scotland.
Cricket’s insane insistence on limiting ODI status to the top 16 teams in the world is to blame. In January 2014, the Netherlands lost two matches in the World Cup qualifiers – and, as punishment, lost ODI status for a full four years, until the World Cup qualifier in 2018.
Cricket is unique in having such a haughty attitude towards status. All other sports have an approach that marries inclusion with common sense: if two nations play each other in competitive international sport, allow it to be classed as such.
Andorra against Luxembourg is a football international, in the same way that Argentina against Brazil is. Iran’s Ali Daei is the top goalscorer in international football history, even though no one pretends that he’s the best striker. That’s OK – statisticians, fans
England’s domestic cricket would benefit hugely from Khan’s presence, not just in T20 cricket but also the first-class game
and the memory of Pelé have all survived.
Yet cricket has instead adopted an exclusive attitude, believing that allowing more teams to play full ODIs – or Test matches – would be akin to “dancing on the grave of Donald Bradman”, as one Associate administrator once lamented to me.
When the decision was made to expand ODI status to 16 teams in 2006, the Editor’s Notes in the 2006 edition of
Wisden railed against “the expansion menace”, largely on the grounds that it would “add another layer of distortion to cricket’s poor old statistics”. But the point of sport is not to generate statistics.
When the Dutch play Zimbabwe, the games will be played with exactly the same rules as ODIs. But because the games will not be classed as ODIs, media interest will be far less, supporters are less likely to go, and the prospects of the matches being streamed – even online – are reduced; when Scotland played the Dutch a few years ago, they were not even sure if they could class the games as internationals in posters advertising the games.
Prospects of sponsorship are also reduced. And for Dutch players in county cricket, it will be harder to justify missing county cricket to play, meaning that the Netherlands are less likely to win, and therefore to generate the extra publicity the sport badly needs in the country.
It amounts to an egregious and utterly pointless act of self-harm. Extending ODI status would not cost those who run the sport any extra cash, and would not have any impact on the Full Members’ finances or schedule.
All it would mean is that Associate countries would be better-placed to boost the profile of the sport and generate some much-needed extra cash – free money to cricket. Instead, the sport’s prospects of expansion are sacrificed at the altar of keeping statistics pure.