Two tiered Tests could work but probably won't

A story broke this past week by Australian cricket writer Daniel Brettig revealed that the ICC was planning to introduce two tiers to the World Test Championship. When I first saw this my immediate reaction was to say "introduce?".

Because there have always been two or more tiers to Test cricket. Imperial Cricket Conference members and non members. ICC full members and associate members. Big Three and Small Seven. World Test Championship teams and non WTC teams. Two (or more) tiers is nothing new.

The reasons given for two tiers at the moment are predictable - more matches between England, India and Australia, with plans for at least one series between the two sides every single year. The theory being that this will make the top tier make more money because the best/more popular teams are playing more.

This of course ignores the possibility of people becoming fed up of seeing the same teams playing each other again and again ad nauseum. Maybe, just maybe, the reason India v Pakistan is such an important match at global events is because the teams hardly ever play each other.

How will these tiers be decided? The reports that it will lead to more India/England/Australia series reveals something - it's unlikely to be on merit. The big three plus whatever other teams they feel like playing will make up the top tier.

Such a situation will only serve to make the rich richer and entrench the already existing inequalities inherent in the way international cricket is structured.

The marketing of Test cricket, such that it is, largely involves people saying things like "how good is Test cricket?" every time there's an exciting match or series. This isn't a sustainable marketing strategy. If we are to make Test cricket bigger and better the answer isn't in a hard tiered system but in a divisional system where teams rise and fall according to their performance and any team can - in theory - aspire to playing in the top tier.

Talking about how good Test cricket is and wanting to restrict it - or the highest level of it - to fewer teams are mutually exclusive positions to hold. If Test cricket really is the best format, surely we want more teams involved, not less?

But the big three don't want open compeition. They don't want to have their fixtures determined for them. They want to play amongst themselves with the occasional game against other opponents. Witness Cricket Australia announcing that one of the benefits of the now ODI Super League free Future Tours Programme was that there were "no ICC mandated fixtures".

Tiered Test cricket could be great and could really help grow the format if done right. Unfortunately, history suggests that it won't be great and will only help shrink the format and make it more exclusive.

Inaction on Afghanistan

The controversy over Afghanistan's continued presence in ICC global events has been growing recently, with a group of over 160 UK MPs writing to the ECB urging them to boycott England's upcoming ICC Champions Trophy game against Afghanistan.

The ECB are resisting the calls, saying that they are boycotting bilateral cricket against the Taliban controlled nation (not that they were playing bilaterally against them anyway) but were unable to do so in ICC events. ECB CEO Richard Gould has instead called on the ICC to take action over the Afghanistan Cricket Board.

Such calls are somewhat disingenuous - the ICC can do very little without the say so if its existing full members (of which the ECB is one of the primary ones) and Gould knows this. He also knows that the ECB fully supported exempting Afghanistan from the full membership criteria on women's cricket back in 2017.

Whilst the ECB couldn't have forseen what has happened in Afghanistan since, the time to do something was then - it is much easier to prevent a national board from becoming a full member than it is to stop them from being one.

The human rights situation in Afghanistan - especially for women - is horrific. Comparisons are often made with cricket's action on the apartheid regime in South Africa but this is a rather rose tinted view of what cricket actually did around that particular dark spot in human history.

Whilst it is often thought that the D'Oliveira Affair led to South Africa's expulsion from the ICC, it actually happened seven years after the ICC had cancelled South Africa's membership, and that wasn't to do with apartheid it was because South Africa had left the Commonwealth as ICC membership then required membership in that organisation.

England, Australia and New Zealand simply continued to play bilaterally against South Africa, with England even organising a home series against South Africa two years after the D'Oliveira affair until they were shamed out of it by protests, as were Australia when they planned to host South Africa in 1971-72. New Zealand sent a women's side to South Africa that same season.

A "moratorium" on bilateral tours was eventually agreed, which ultimately led to the so-called rebel tours of the 1980s. A number of England players from those tours - funded by the apartheid government in one of the early examples of the modern phenomenon of sportswashing - now hold leadership positions in English cricket.

Pleas for the ICC to do something about the human rights situation in Afghanistan are likely to fall on deaf ears. This is an organisation quite happy to take money from an oil company owned by a government (Saudi Arabia) that Amnesty International describes as one where its people have their basic human rights ignored and their freedoms restricted and one where human rights campaigners are routinely imprisoned.

But while that sponsor (Aramco) are unlikely to be moved, maybe the ICC's other sponsors might be. Are Coca Cola really comfortable with their logo appearing at events where Afghanistan are treated like an ordinary member of the international community?

Ultimately, the main language of the ICC is money. Hitting them where it hurts by persuading their sponsors to stop looking the other way may be the only way to get them to take action on Afghanistan.

Don't mention the EuroSlam

Cricket Ireland, Cricket Scotland and the KNCB have announced that the EuroSlam - initially planned for 2019 but "postponed" every year since - will finally take place this summer.

Only it won't be the EuroSlam (or EuroSham/EuroScam as some dubbed it), it will instead be the European T20 Premier League. The participating cities - Belfast, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam and Rotterdam are expected to be the same, but any mention of the EuroSlam was conspicuous by its absence in the press release announcing that the ICC had sanctioned the competition.

The backers also appear to be different, with some overlap with those who have invested in Major League Cricket in the USA, which has been a success to some extent.

More details will hopefully be forthcoming, but hopefully it will actually manage to take the field unlike its predecessor. The T20 League marketplace is a crowded one though, especially at the time of year the league is planned to run, and it will need to develop a distinct identity to stand out from the crowd. If it's just the same players playing for the same team nicknames as happens in most other T20 leagues, it's unlikely to carve out a niche for itself.

So it's farewell to the EuroSlam and hello to the European T20 Premier League. Maybe it will be different this time.