50-over cricket to stay: ICC

The proposed initiative of Cricket Australia to restructure 50-over cricket to refuel interest among its spectators received a serious setback with International Cricket Council’s declaration that ODI cricket in its current form is here to stay, at least till 2015.

The ICC said all three formats of the game are equally important.

“The ICC is committed to the three forms of the game, being Test cricket, 50-over cricket and Twenty20 cricket, and we have a working party of eminent chief executives set up to look at the context and content of international cricket,” an ICC spokesperson said. Yet the ICC would need to market 50-over cricket better since most of the one-dayers have empty stands in recent times. The popularity of Twenty20 has completely stolen the market of the traditional one-day internationals.

Ford Ranger Cup: popularity waning

Cricket is one of the most popular sports in Australia. The Twenty20 domestic tournament in Australia or the Big Bash has a crowd of more than twenty thousand per match, whereas the one-day competition called Ford Ranger Cup hardly has hardly ten percent of seats filled by people coming to follow their teams in the big stadiums of Australia. Keeping in mind that Australia along with New Zealand is scheduled to host the 50-over World Cup in 2015, Cricket Australia is desperate to make changes in the format so that its popularity does not got down. They had been contemplating a system of two innings of 20-overs or 25-overs each, so that each innings is short. With the ICC’s decision not to tamper with the format, Cricket Australia may have to think of other ways to get the crowds in. Changing it in the domestic tournament from next year as they were planning to do would be disastrous for their World Cup campaign as well as alienate the Aussie crowds who would be used to the new format than the one in international cricket.

CA is in a fix now. It fears it loses in both cases, since if on the other hand they let their 50-over domestic competition be stagnant as it is, by the time 2015 World Cup would arrive, interest in one-day cricket may wane to the point of irrelevance.

The ICC has a cricket committee which is looking into how one-dayers would retain their competitiveness and relevance by introducing a global league with promotion and relegation system.

Only time will tell whether crowds compel authorities to chop and change integral parts of cricket.