In another world, not so very far from our own, the Champions Trophy is over already. It was scrapped back in 2012, leaving Australia as its everlasting champions, and right now everyone is getting ready for the second edition of the World Test Championship, the competition with which the International Cricket Council has twice tried, and twice failed, to replace it. They backed out on both occasions, unable, or unwilling, to overcome the objections of their sponsors and broadcasters. If they had followed through, we would be about to see two Test semi-finals, one between India and South Africa, the other Australia and Pakistan. England, who were supposed to play host, would not have qualified because they slipped to fifth in the rankings after a 4-0 series defeat by India last winter.
Instead, we have another edition of the tin-pot World Cup, a competition whose key feature is that it does not last as long as the real thing. Meanwhile, everyone is still wondering what is to be done about Test cricket, fretting over how to give it more context. When the former ICC president Jagmohan Dalmiya first floated the idea of the Champions Trophy at an ICC conference in 1998, he explained that it was only one half of his plan for the future of the sport. As the Guardian reported at the time: “The idea of a Test World Championship will also be discussed. Dalmiya said the plan would be to set aside a two- or three-month period when cricket could be played by all Test countries over the world simultaneously.”
Two decades later, we are still waiting. And now the schedule has grown so tight that finding two or three spare weeks is impossible, never mind two or three months. Back then there was, at least, a good reason for the ICC to stage a secondary one-day tournament – Dalmiya wanted to raise money to fund a development programme. In the 90s the ICC had a rule stipulating that no one was allowed to stage a tournament involving more than four teams, because it would undermine the World Cup. It was brought in because new competitions were sprouting around the world, the Austral-Asia Cup in the United Arab Emirates, the Hero and Nehru Cups in India. Having banned these events, the ICC almost immediately launched one of their own, the Champions Trophy.
Or rather, the Wills International Cup, which is what they called the first one when they put it on in Bangladesh. The ‘Wills’ bit was important. The sponsors coughed up £6m, the TV companies another £10m between them. It was not shown in Britain, but no one in the ICC much minded about that. The aim, explained Dalmiya, was to help “spread cricket to all corners of the world”. He was particularly keen to promote the game in Bangladesh, who had, at that point, 100,000 players, but no first-class competition. So the ICC’s nine Test teams were rounded up to play a knockout tournament at the renovated stadium in Dhaka, and the Bangladesh Cricket Board got to keep all the money made on the gate. Two years later, they became a Test team.
England sent a second XI, since their main squad was already in Australia before the Ashes, promptly lost their first match against South Africa, then had to hang around for two days for a group photograph before they flew home. On the night of their one game, it was so hot and humid that their captain, Adam Hollioake, started to hallucinate and had to leave the field because he was worried he was going to faint. “I felt like I’d smoked 10 joints,” Hollioake said afterwards. Which may explain why he decided to let Ali Brown bowl his off-spin in the second innings. South Africa went on to beat the West Indies in the final.
“It was such a success,” said Dalmiya’s successor Malcolm Gray, “it was decided to stage it every two years.” The second tournament was held at the Nairobi Gymkhana in 2000. The ICC expanded it to 11 teams, so that, this time around, the hosts got to play in the competition. They also rebranded it as the ICC Knock-Out. “I am confident that the memories of this tournament will provide the youth of Kenya and Africa with the motivation and sense of purpose to pick up ball and bat and play cricket,” Gray said. Three years later, Kenya made it to the semi-finals of the 2003 World Cup.
The 2002 tournament, the first called the Champions Trophy, was bigger again. There were 12 teams now, and a league format. It was staged in Colombo, just before the monsoon season. Hardly anyone turned up to watch the group stages, and the final was washed out twice over so the title had to be shared between Sri Lanka and India. Sri Lanka had been co-hosts of the 1996 World Cup, but West Indies and Australia had refused to play there. So, for the third time in a row, the Champions Trophy was arguably the biggest sporting event ever staged in the country hosting it. And then, in 2004, the Champions Trophy came to England.
Since then, it has been held in India, South Africa, and then England again. The aim of using it to grow the game has been abandoned. Over that same stretch of time, it has been cut from 12 teams to 10 teams to eight teams, changed from a league competition with four groups to a league with two groups, and switched from taking place every two years to every four years. The ICC basically makes up the rules as it goes along. And yes, along the way everyone has a lot of fun. But still, they say now that this may well be the last edition. Which likely means that, in a wide-open tournament, the one sure bet is that it will be back on in 2021. If they do kill it off, it will serve as an enduring monument to the muddled thinking of the men and women who ran the sport in the early 2000s.
This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
