The Independent Voice of West Indies Cricket

Minnows brought value to World Cup

Sat, Mar 28, '15

by VINODE MAMCHAN

Commentary

The International Cricket Council (ICC) has decided that they would narrow down the show piece Cricket World Cup event to just 10 nations for the next event in 2019 in England.

This decision has been met with great resistance and there is a petition that has close to 20,000 signatures on it, which is calling on the ICC to rethink this move.

There are 14 nations at the current event and this means that six will be missing out come next World Cup. The regular ICC full members West Indies, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Australia, England, South Africa, New Zealand, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, will be the ones battling for supremacy.

At the current World Cup, the minnows and this time Ireland, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Afghanistan and Scotland all created great excitement during their matches. Ireland took it further and defeated two Test playing full member nations in West Indies and Zimbabwe. They narrowly missed out on qualifying for the quarter-finals and this from a team that played just nine ODIs (One Day International) in between the 2011 and current World Cup.