Cricket Ireland
The board of Ireland known as Cricket Ireland is considering challenging ICC’s decision to exclude the associate members from the 2015 World Cup.
The ICC in its executive board meeting in Mumbai on the 4th of April had discussed a few key issues with regards to the present condition of cricket and the future of cricket. One major decision taken in this meeting was the exclusion of the regular 4 associate members from the World Cup 2015 which is to be played in Australia and New Zealand.
Thus the next World Cup shall be seeing only the 10 permanent members of the ICC competing for the Cup that matters. However this decision has angered the 95 associate members of the ICC, who believe that the World Cup was a great stage for them to show their improvement.
The decision to exclude the so called ‘minnows’ was taken due to the time factor involved in having fourteen teams compete during the tournament. As seen this time the tournament went on for about a month and a half and rather tired all the players.
One way of reducing the time which was applied during the tournament was making the quarter finals a knock out round, which saw some good teams like Australia and South Africa get thrashed out of the tournament due to one bad game.
There were also complaints by some eminent players like Andrew Strauss regarding the time gap of the entire tournament. A similar complaint was put up by the Australian board which said that their team had lost the initial momentum that they had gained by playing against the “minnows”. Thus the ICC decided to have the next tournament four years down the line with just 10 teams.
However there were certain exceptions in the tournament like Ireland beating England and themselves giving certain teams like India and West Indies a good fight. Thus the Irish board has decided that such a decision to exclude them or the other three teams that would qualify for the World Cup from the 95 teams is not encouraging their cause.
Cricket Ireland Chief Warren Deutrom said, “I can assure you that we’re not taking this lying down. We’ve just moved out of the anger and indignation phase and we’re now seriously examining our options.”
“We have spent the last few days talking with the other emerging cricket nations to build a consensus among the 95 non-Test countries – more than 90% of the ICC’s membership – and we’re now at the point where we decide what we do. Everyone agrees we must challenge the decision but we must think about what any challenge would look like, who brings it, how much it costs and what is the appropriate forum.”
“I’ve received a number of e-mails from prominent sports lawyers who say the decision is imminently challenge-able.”
He further put in that they would first try their hand at whatever is possible within the ICC to revert the decision and only if there is no outcome will they try to move to the Court Of Arbitration for Sports (CAS). In his words,”Legal action has to be the last resort. It’s such a painful route to go down to try to sue your own governing body.”
Thus Deutrom would be waiting for the Sunday’s Annual General Meeting of Cricket Ireland, to take up this issue and try to get whatever outcome that can be got out of it.
Tags: Associates, Cricket, Cricket Ireland, ICC, ICC Cricket World Cup 2015, World Cup
