Exclusivity of cricket reflects imperial age
The editor of Cricket Statistician analyses recent events
In most sports an international match is an international match and that’s it. And in the early stages of competition a team ranked in the world’s top ten may play one in the bottom 50.
Most sports want as many of their member countries to take part in their various “World Cup” competitions as possible, even if it leads to some gross mismatches. In April 2001 Australia beat American Samoa 31-0 in an early stage of the football World Cup. FIFA introduced a preliminary round in the Oceania Group and Australia subsequently opted to join the Asian Group, but the result – including Archie Thompson’s 13 goals – remains on the books.
FIFA ranks countries by their recent results, currently showing Brazil at the top. Bahamas, Eritrea, Gibraltar, Somalia and Tonga are joint 206th. American Samoa are now 189th. Gibraltar are playing in the European qualifying rounds of the World Cup, so far losing all five games they have played, but they still count.
Some of the leading international players have filled their boots at the expense of these teams, but this does not seem to worry football statisticians (a lowly tribe which had few numbers to play with until the development of ingame statistics and computer analysis). The leading teams do not, you might note, play minor ones in friendlies, only when drawn against them in competition.
But cricket is different, with only a few favoured nations allowed to play Test cricket and a couple more allowed to play ODIs. The favoured teams receive far more money from the ICC than the others, which could be seen as a way of keeping the minnows in their place and maintaining the status quo.
The difficulty here is shown by the position of Ireland, who have reached the brink of Test status after many years of striving well after the team itself has peaked, looking less than competitive against England, and now clearly less strong than Afghanistan, who may also be contenders.
I am not aware of any other sport in which there is a line drawn between the good teams and the rest, with a status perpetuated by the finances of the game. But of course cricket has developed haphazardly, and Test status is a by-product of a political carve-up in 1909 which established the Imperial Cricket Conference and excluded the then-powerful Philadelphia side.
Until the Sixties the ICC showed very little interest in the rest of the world, and although MCC teams might play in Egypt or East Africa or Argentina, these were very much old boys’ outings to play against white settlers and officials. It seems that something of the old colonial attitude still lingers even though the Asian countries are now on the top side of the table.