After a five-day meeting the International Cricket Council has finally decided to convert the 2021 Champions Trophy into a World T20 event.
This news did not make any sense and the relevance of this decision is being questioned repeatedly. This is because two ICC World T20 events are now happening in two years consecutively.
The first one is scheduled to happen in Australia in the year 2020, while the other one will now happen in India in 2021. Surprisingly, the decision to replace the Champions Trophy with T20 World Cup was unanimous according to ICC Chief Executive Dave Richardson.
According to him this decision was taken as strategic point of view as it will help in growing the game of cricket even further. However, this decision questions two things.
The first one is that is ICC trying to scrape off the concept of Champions Trophy altogether? This may be a possibility as this trophy has several times come under the scrutiny of several critics.
This is because they find it irrelevant to have a 50-over cup when there is already a 50 over World Cup in place that is going to happen in 2019 and 2023 respectively.
The second question arises that is the International Cricket Council trying to promote T20 cricket because of it’s profitability and the amount of revenue that it generates?
T20 leagues are happening every year with every country trying to generate millions from their individual leagues. This has affected cricket badly as most players now prefer to play these leagues and earn big bucks rather than play for their country.
The prime example of this scenario is West Indies. Although, they managed to qualify for the World Cup but most of their key players namely, Sunil Narine, Andre Russell and others have made T20 their bread and butter.
Playing for one’s nation was once a proud thing, however T20 leagues have completely changed this way of thinking. And, on top of that the International Cricket Council has also shifted their priorities to T20 which will further damage this sport.
Also, after this decision ICC’s responsibility of safe-guarding the longer formats namely One-day cricket and especially Test cricket comes into question.
Test Cricket is already a dying format and instead of taking steps to revive this format, ICC seems pretty busy in generating revenues through T20 cricket.
One can only hope that ICC diverts its attention towards the longer formats of this game or the beautiful game of cricket will become non-existent in the future.
