It doesn't really require you to be professional. A long first-class competition with lots of teams will require professionalism, particularly if the playing period is 4 days. If you had say 6 teams like Australia playing 4-day first-class cricket then if it was a single round-robin league with the team that tops the league being declared champion, each player in every team would play 5 matches and need 2 days off for each match. Taking 10 days off out of the year to play cricket wouldn't really work since employers would be unlikely to give it outside of normal vacation/leave time and you can't fault people for not wanting to take 10 days out of their vacation to essentially go to their second job.maehara wrote:Stepping off-topic for a moment: the problem with multi-day cricket in this day & age is that it almost by definition requires your players to be professionals, because very few employers are going to give them the regular time off that would be needed to compete in a multi-day competition.JHunter wrote:You see I'm beginning to suspect that we won't see any more test playing nations because almost all the nations which have some interest in multi-day cricket at home (except Argentina) are already test nations.
But there is no minimum requirement as to the number of teams needed in a first-class competition (except 2 teams by definition since a competition can't have just 1 team) and first-class cricket needs to be held over a minimum of 3 days. So for a place like Ireland they could easily have a first-class tournament of 3-day matches (Saturday, Sunday and either Friday or Monday) contested by 3 teams in a single round-robin format. Under that system there would be a total of 3 matches and each player on each team would play 2 matches and only require 1 day off from work for each match. So unless they are working under slave conditions, it really shouldn't be too hard to take 2 days off out of the 250+ working weekdays in the year to play first class cricket. They could even make it double round robin and have each team play 4 matches with players only needing to take 4 days off out of the year. After that they can then pick the consistent amateur performers to be awarded professional contracts to play for Ireland in tests.
That's true. No first-class competition is self-sustaining, but that still should not be a barrier to associates setting up their own 3-day competition. I know for a fact that in league cricket (non first-class) in Australia, West Indies and England there a players who will play 3-day cricket and 2-day cricket with matches usually being on Saturdays and Sundays (2-day cricket), or on a Saturday, the following Sunday and then the next Saturday (3-day league cricket) or sometimes on 3 consecutive Saturdays (3-day cricket). A lot of these league players are not professionals and if they perform well then they will get picked by their State (Australia)/Territory (WI)/County (England) to play professionally in the first-class league. A lot of cricket associations and fans from associates and affiliates seem only to be looking at the modern first-class system and think they need to put that in place with all its modern trappings if they want to play tests but that is not the requirement and that approach overlooks the much more complicated system of league cricket which feeds into the first-class system and overlooks the history of those first-class systems.The requirement for potential Full Members to have a "financially self-sustaining first class competition", as believe the ICC's requirements read, is also a bit of a red herring - there isn't a financially self-sustaining first class competition in existence anywhere, they all survive off the proceeds of T20 and international matches (domestic 40/50 over is usually loss-making as well, I believe)
A lot of current associates and affiliates are addicted to 50-over cricket. And I mean addicted. They waste a lot of resources on 50-over cricket. Take Ireland for instance, if you look at their most senior one day club competition (the Bob Kerr Irish Senior Cup) what do you notice? Here's a link for it's fixtures: http://www.cricketeurope4.net/CEIRELAND ... bout.shtml
What jumps out at me are the following:
- The Irish Senior Cup has 35 or 36 teams playing in it. This from a nation with 4 provincial unions with a total of 138 clubs (the 138 clubs by the way field 324 teams). (see: http://www.cricketeurope4.net/CEIRELAND ... ture.shtml for the number of clubs and teams)
- it has 19 matches in what appears to be the preliminary round and round 1 (out of a preliminary round, 3 main rounds, 2 semi-finals and a final).
It seems like a waste of money to me to have a senior competition with 30+ teams in it. Even India's Ranji trophy has 27 teams divided into two leagues and then 2 groups within each league. India's one day competition for the Ranji teams (the Vijay Hazare trophy) splits the 27 teams up into 5 zones. With Ireland I would guess a lot of money and time is wasted in order to accomodate so many teams. The number of teams may only represent 11% of the total number of teams but it still too much. They could cut in half or even down to 20 and probably free up enough weekends to start a 3-day competition (Saturday-Sunday-next Saturday type matches) and all the money that would have gone into staging the matches for the other 15 or so teams could go into staging the 3-day matches. If they did it right they could probably have a 3-day competition along with a rationalized Senior Cup on the same budget of the current Senior Cup.
And this is what I notice as an outside observer. I've read that some of you have been to Ireland (Maweni I think being one among those of you who have been to Ireland) - I would not be surprised if those of you who have been in Ireland have observed even more examples of situations which could be rationalized.
Actually I now believe that this is the excuse why Ireland hasn't bothered setting up multi-day competitions. I know other top associates have either planned (Netherlands and Scotland) or attempted (Kenya) to set up multi-day competitions. Kenya's Elite League in particular was meant to be the first proper 3-day tournament with more than just 2 teams (like in Argentina) outside the full member nations. But then the 2007/08 elections became violent and then there was bad weather and eventually problems with player availability so that the 3-day league was restructed into a 2-day league in June/July 2008. I don't recall even the 2-day competition being held again.- which is why Ireland and the others haven't bothered setting multi-day competitions up. They need what limited income they have for their national sides.
I recall talking about this on other forums such as at CricketEurope and the response I got when I suggested that the Senior Cup should be cut and a minimalist 3-day league instituted was a lot of complaining and reasons why it couldn't be done and so forth. Then people would go into the tired old argument about how the ICC should basically become Ireland's whore by giving them money to become professional and to pay the top players (usually implying that the full salary of the top players should be paid by the ICC) and would moan about how much money (usually quoted as around $14 million) the ICC gives to each full member nation (with Zimbabwe and Bangladesh coming in for particular criticism). At that point I realized I was dealing with people who, I'm sad to say, had a beggar mentality and who were either ignorant of key facts or ignored key facts so that their views wouldn't be shaken. If they were to actually look into the amount of money which each full member board handles (such as the Australian board: http://www.e-brochures.com.au/cricket_a ... e_2010.pdf or the English board: http://static.ecb.co.uk/files/ecb-annua ... -11060.pdf) they would see that this ICC grant whilst helpful would not constitute the entire budget of the boards and that all boards have other significant sources of revenue (usually collected from TV rights, Radio rights and gate receipts for international tours and domestic twenty20 and list A competitions). No full member nation pays the entirety of it's top players' salaries from the ICC grants. In addition they seemed to be willfully overlooking the fact that just about ALL of that money that the ICC gives the full members in grants actually comes from the full members themselves. The ICC doesn't have a printing press or a money tree and most of the money gained specifically by the ICC comes from ICC tournaments such as the World Twenty20, World Cup and Champions Trophy and in those tournaments only full members have the infrastructure to do the lion's share of the hosting and they all provide the most gate receipts. Note that even the 2007 World Cup which was derided by commentators (because I think a lot of cricket commentators have a disease whereby they simply must be derisive) sold more tickets than the previous world cups (670,000+ tickets) and had the highest gate receipts at the time (The fact that a lot of Indian and Pakistani fans decided to leave the Caribbean after having paid for tickets isn't the fault of the organizers but of the Indian and Pakistani teams hence lots of tickets sold but also lots of empty seats in the matches that were expected to be contested by India and Pakistan). The 2011 World Cup is likely to have sold the most tickets and and gained the most revenue of any Cricket World Cup ever. But most of those receipts came from fans wanting to see full members play each other or play associates. Indians/South Asians came out to see India play Ireland but not to see Ireland v. Netherlands or Kenya v. Canada. If Ireland and the Netherlands were to host a cricket world cup on their own, who seriously believes that the majority of fans wouldn't be English rather than Irish or Dutch? Even in full members with smaller populations like New Zealand and West Indies one can sometimes get 15-20,000 people coming out for one game. It is doubtful that Ireland or the Netherlands could get that many folks coming to one ground even if they had the seating (they could probably get 5-7,000).
What really disgusts me about that attitude is that I'm sure if you were to ask those folks if they would join say the local communist party they would give a look of horror and would also find a million reasons why in other ventures in life (such as in the economy or football) that similar schemes shouldn't be implemented if it would result in a net loss of money for themselves or for Ireland as a country or Irish sporting teams. Yet what they are advocating for cricket is a kind of communist system. Even that isn't correct because I've seen some comments to the effect that Ireland could become a test team and still rely on England's county championship to provide their main players with first-class experience. It isn't even socialistic, but parasitic - they want the ICC to give Ireland oodles of cash which Ireland as a team and a fan-base barely contributed to and then some want England to provide Ireland with a first-class competition. To me, if a group isn't going to make any attempt to help themselves then they don't deserve any handouts/help whatsoever. If Kenya with all its problems could really try to stage a 3-day league and even ended up staging a 2-day league there is absolutely no reason why Ireland (which would not have election violence as an impediment) couldn't do the same. The fact that they (from their Chief Executive right down to the fans on the forums) complain about an ICC "glass ceiling" and gripe about the ICC not helping is tantamount to insulting the Kenyans who as far as I know never once asked the ICC for money to try to stage their 3-day Elite League.
Had Ireland instituted a 3-day league in say 2008 after their memorable 2007 World Cup (and let's be honest they had a better 2007 World Cup with wins over Pakistan and Bangladesh, a tie with Zimbabwe and progression to the second round than they did with 2011 where they only beat an inconsistent England who at one point were very much in danger of losing to the Netherlands) then perhaps by 2015 the ICC would have been forced to include Ireland in the next world cup as a full member (Ireland would probably have fulfilled all the requirements by then) since if I recall correctly all full members must participate in the Cricket World Cup (as part of their obligations as full members)..at least until the current TV contract runs out (the same contract which makes it impossible to have less than about 45 matches in the world cup no matter what the format - yet another reason I believe the 2007, 2003 and previous world cups were unnecessarily derided as being "too long" since they weren't that much longer than 2011 and couldn't have been much shorter anyway).
