It probably wasn’t the biggest news of the cricket week that Australia would play the United Arab Emirates for the first time in any international format. But the Twenty20 match in Abu Dhabi on Monday was significant nonetheless, and heartening – a cricketing power making the effort to play a smaller team while preparing for a bigger series, in a manner that ideally would be standard the world over.
At the same time, it was apt that the day before the match came the ICC announcement that the 2023 men’s World Cup will again feature only 10 teams, like next year’s edition in England. The strong and reasoned criticism of this structure from around the world has been disregarded. And so the UAE’s chance of returning to the game’s marquee tournament after appearing in 2015 is practically nil.
On the current tour, there was plenty of work behind the scenes from Cricket Australia staff along with Pakistan’s board and the Emirates Cricket Board to change a warm-up match into a full international. The pitch had been prepared at the local stadium’s secondary ground, requiring venue approval by the ICC. The effort was commendable, with team manager Gavin Dovey saying that formalising the game’s status brought benefits for both sides.
“I reckon it’s awesome,” agreed Australia’s explosive batsman Chris Lynn. “[It’s] the best thing they could have done. To help out the UAE and help their status in the game … but for us as well, because we want to hit the ground running, and there’s no better way to do that than a proper fixture.
“We’ve seen Afghanistan over the past couple of years, and some of the players who’ve come out of that are unbelievable. UAE’s not far behind them. As a team they might not be as strong, but if one or two blokes can get picked up in say the IPL, it’s going to be great for cricket.”
At the same time, Cricket Australia has been a key backer of cutting the World Cup. This is a purely financial decision: in short, if India were knocked out too early in the tournament, it would cost too many viewers and dollars. The current format guarantees nine India matches through the pool stage, inflating the value of broadcast rights. People blame the ICC, but national boards are the ones who take that revenue. Australia, England, and India get the lion’s share. So the drivers and main beneficiaries of keeping smaller countries out are the three wealthiest boards.
It’s easy to make the argument that teams outside the top 10 aren’t up to the standard. The UAE side lost two wickets to Australia’s opening quicks before scoring a run. Despite an impressive recovery, a score of 117 was never likely to test Australia, who ran it down with three overs to spare.
But there will always be bad games. There’ll be good ones, too. The UAE were one of the joys of the 2015 World Cup. Shaiman Anwar rattled off 67 against Zimbabwe, 106 against Ireland, 62 against Pakistan and 39 against South Africa, and his team came within a few balls of winning those first two. Recent years have proved the competitiveness of so-called associates. Scotland beat England earlier this year in a genuine one-day thriller. So did Netherlands in in the 2009 World T20, and Ireland in the 2011 World Cup. That was the catalyst for Ireland fighting their way up to Test status alongside Afghanistan. Hong Kong recently ran India all the way to the line in the Asia Cup. Such teams may be outmatched, but the more they play, the more upsets will occur.
But progress can’t happen when teams aren’t seen. For the 2019 World Cup, each of those aforementioned teams was crammed into a qualifying tournament along with Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan and West Indies. Only those last two made it through. There was brilliant cricket played but hardly anyone saw it. It lives on in few memories, unlike if those contests happened at a World Cup proper. The 2023 qualifiers will go the same way, with 10 vibrant and exciting teams fighting for two spots.
Cricket is a sport that needs to provide the hope of growth, not the dismay of retraction. And if the game is honest, it only has Australia, England and India in relative good health. Another four are competitive on the field but struggle financially: South Africa, Pakistan, New Zealand and Sri Lanka. Zimbabwe is a mess on both counts, Bangladesh is improving on both but could slip back, and the bottom could fall out of the West Indies at any minute.
Developing the game matters. “It was a great opportunity for us,” said UAE captain Rohan Mustafa after the game. “They have very good fast bowlers, and we had to come back and score 117 on this wicket which was not easy. If we play matches like that against some Test nations, we’ll learn from them. As you saw, we did a great job against the third position in T20 [world rankings].”
The efforts of the Australian administrators on tour to give some sunlight to a country in need of growth is commendable. But at higher levels, the same administration is blocking those opponents into ever-greater shade. One step forward, two steps back, was how Australian Test captain Tim Paine described his team’s tour against Pakistan in the UAE. The nation that hosted those two sides could reasonably feel the same way.
