World Cup debrief: Dice rolls against Ireland at crapshoot tournament

Does blame at Irish woes lie with the lack of player adaptability or the ICC's inability to provide top of the range playing conditions?

This article by Nathan Johns first appeared here https://theparttimer.substack.com/p/world-cup-debrief-dice-roll-against and is reproduced by kind permission of the author.

As is often the case, the protagonists themselves had the words to best sum up what was a bizarre and underwhelming Irish T20 World Cup campaign.

The customary official Cricket Ireland review into the events of the last fortnight will now take place. This will be at least in part financed by an additional €200,000 impact fund from Sport Ireland, a welcome funding boost. Some of that money went towards allowing high performance director Richard Holdsworth, the author of the upcoming review, to travel with the team in America to inform his analysis. A number of other projects also benefited from the funding, including the warm-up tri-series in the Netherlands and the recent women’s World Cup qualifying campaign.

These reviews aim for clarity but, depending on the author, can sometimes become bogged down by corporate language which is light on substance. Especially when outside consultants are involved, as they have been in the past.

If Holdsworth is looking for clarity in the coming weeks, he need look no further than Mark Adair, his seam-bowling all-rounder. As journalists scrambled for eloquent intros to postmortem analysis pieces, Adair did all the work for us when subtly referencing Gennaro Gattuso, the former AC Milan and Italy footballer via an Instagram post.

“As Gattuso once said,” wrote Adair on Ireland’s World Cup, leaving connoisseurs of meme culture to fill in the blanks. For those who wisely stay away from TikTok, the mysterious quote comes from a beautifully chaotic press conference way back when. Asked to sum up a performance, Gattuso shouted back in his strong Italian accent: “Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit.”

Joking aside, given the money spent on travel and the importance of taking stock after unsuccessful campaigns, Holdsworth can’t simply quote Messrs Adair and Gattuso in his review and leave it at that. Even so, such was the chaos and unpredictability of this World Cup, sometimes the most simple, if a touch vulgar, summation is the best analysis.

The “sometimes maybe good” of Ireland’s campaign includes the bowling fightback against Pakistan - albeit every team seems to expose their fragile middle order these days - and the batting partnership between Adair and George Dockrell which threatened to save the game against Canada. The death bowling in that contest was decent too, even if the middle overs effort let the Canadians get too many runs on a tricky surface.

As far as Ireland are concerned, the “sometimes maybe shit” emphatically outweighs the “sometimes maybe good”. The top order collapses against India and Pakistan pretty much ended those contests in the first innings. The lack of boundaries for a near 10-over span against Canada simply wasn’t good enough.

But the “maybe shit” also extends to factors forced upon Ireland as well as their performances. It has been well documented that the pitch in New York was terrible for batting. Against an already stellar Indian seam attack, batting first was a fool’s errand when every ball nipped AND either kept low or zipped off a length. The sideways movement disappeared against Canada, but the bounce was still uneven.

In Florida, the Overton Window was at play. On initial viewing, the Broward County pitch brought relief; it wasn’t as woefully poor as New York. But, perhaps not helped by all the rain and the inevitable moisture dripping into the pitch, there was still more in it for the bowlers than is the norm in T20 cricket - as Shaheen Shah Afridi can attest.

Off the pitch, as was documented previously on this site, Ireland were not exactly treated well by the ICC. In the build-up to the tournament, their booking was moved from a hotel close to the New York - well, Long Island really - venue to one 90 minutes away in Brooklyn.

“New York was a bit of a scrap,” explained Lorcan Tucker, speaking after the final defeat to Pakistan. “We were staying a long way away from the ground, so it felt like we were on the bus the whole time stuck in traffic. It was a great week in New York, the cricket didn’t live up to it but the spectacle of playing India there was amazing.”

India also had more access to the ground pre-match than Ireland did, as well as being based closer to the Long Island training facilities.

Being the only team scheduled to play two matches during Florida’s hurricane season - the dates of which were displayed on a sign helpfully positioned right outside the ground - also didn’t help Ireland’s odds of completing the number of matches required to qualify. In Fort Lauderdale, Ireland were at least given a better hotel than New York when staying at the Ritz. The nicer surroundings made watching it rain all week slightly more bearable.

All told, Ireland had two training sessions over the fortnight (according to Tucker), with a number of hit-outs cancelled due to Floridian weather and the desire to avoid New York’s traffic.

Where, then, does the blame lie? Ireland were very well cooked going into the tournament. They played a high scoring series against Pakistan, scoring more than 175 in each game on a good, if a touch slow surface. At a T20 World Cup where a significant goal was selling the sport to the Americans by slogging the ball into the stands, good quality pitches were expected. In a perverse way, Ireland’s quest in recent years to install better domestic pitches and increase the runs scored both in internationals and interpros worked against them.

"I don't think anyone prepared for what we've seen over the last three or four weeks to be honest,” said head coach Heinrich Malan. “And I think if you ask anyone, no one really wants to see that sort of brand of cricket.

“I think if you look around the world, you look five weeks ago, the IPL teams were getting 200 plus every game and everyone was expecting that. was the excitement around coming to the World Cup.”

Tucker echoes the sentiment of his boss: “We were planning on playing on some better surfaces here and that wasn’t to be. You could argue that we didn’t adapt quick enough.

“It was disappointing. We could have adapted slightly better at stages but there were a lot of things that were out of our control out there. When you’re trying to play a positive brand of cricket and the ball’s jumping around everywhere it can be difficult.”

This is the closest you’ll get to seeing professional sportspeople making excuses. Needless to say, similar to Tucker pointing to Ireland’s lack of adaptability, Malan was keen to highlight that the poor conditions didn’t just affect his players.

“Look, we're not the only team who's had challenges with weather and training and stuff like that,” he said. “We can easily sit here and say it's all down to that, but at the end of the day, those are the conditions and the situations leading into the game. We've hopped on about being more adaptable, being more versatile.

“We thought we were getting there, obviously a couple of weeks ago before this tournament started. [There are] a couple of areas we can still refine and hopefully we can get that consistency that we're after.”

In the debate between blaming Ireland’s inability to grind out passable scores or complaining that the ICC screwed them over with unexpectedly poor conditions, these words suggest the Irish camp leans towards the latter. It will be interesting to see on what side the review falls. It’s not that long since Ireland were grinding out wins when chasing low totals in Zimbabwe last December. This group can be better at the hard yakka.

Ultimately, while that criticism is valid, the lesson from this World Cup in a roundabout, backwards way, can be construed as a compliment to the ICC. When poor batting surfaces and extreme weather make the the venue and toss so crucial, success or failure can turn into a game of chance. The USA beat Canada and Pakistan on beautiful batting tracks in Dallas. Ireland had two games on a New York minefield and two more in what was briefly the wettest place on Earth. No amount of meticulous preparation can account for such variance in luck.

In America’s stick and ball game, baseball, the playoffs are widely seen as a crapshoot. Last year, the Arizona Diamondbacks won only 84 of a possible 162 games, just over 50 per cent of their matches in the regular season. Once they got to the postseason, they made it all the way to the World Series. In 2021, the Atlanta Braves only won 88 regular season games but went on to win the championship. By contrast, the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 100 games in both of those years, didn’t win it all despite being the most talented side.

Accidentally, by creating such a variance in conditions, the ICC turned this World Cup into the chance equivalent of baseball’s showpiece event. Perhaps such cruel, yet thoroughly entertaining (if you’re not Irish) sporting variance will make cricket more familiar and appealing to the Americans.

“That’s tournament cricket, other teams come out on the right side of that and we came out the wrong side,” acknowledged Tucker. “You have to face up to what’s in front of you. We played two tough games against India and Pakistan, they bowled outstandingly on what were tricky pitches and we were disappointing against Canada. That’s one area where we can look at ourselves, we should have won that game.”

Ireland have issues that started before becoming the victims of such American chance. Paul Stirling’s run drought goes on. Questions will be asked on Josh Little’s volume of cricket given how infrequently he played in the build-up to the most important tournament of the year. Yet the players who have been able to paper over such cracks in recent months, especially in the batting department, were dragged into a game which resembled a casino activity rather than a pure sporting contest.

This time around, the house won and Ireland lost big.