Should boards consider intra-country tournaments before jumping the gun

Should boards consider intra-country tournaments before jumping the gun

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Should boards explore the possibility of intra-country matches?

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It has been 92 days since the sport of cricket witnessed a game between two international sides. The weirdest of weird closed-door encounter between Australia and New Zealand, which saw players venturing into the stands to ‘search’ for the ball, marked the halt of the gentleman’s game.

A lot has transpired in the world outside of the sport since then: the number of Covid-19 cases across the world, which stood at 1,25,048 when international cricket came to a halt, has now increased to 7,600,265; the number of deaths, on the other hand, has multiplied by almost 100 times and has increased from 4,613 to 423,901; social distancing is no more a luxury, it is now a necessity and the only part of your body that you need to be worried covering is your mouth. Long story short, it feels like we’re in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse; the world is just not the same anymore and it never might be. 

There is also a very good chance that, at least for the foreseeable future, the sport of cricket might not be the same: games will be played in front of empty stands, bowlers and fielders will not be applying saliva on the ball and bromance between fielders on the field might be restricted to ‘glance and smirk’.

But one thing seems crystal clear - cricketing boards across the world, after having had their hands tied to their backs and after being made to starve for three months, irrespective of what ‘might’ transpire in the next month or two, are keen on putting the sport back on the map. England, Sri Lanka and West Indies have already resumed training and both ECB and WCI are inching closer and closer towards making the impossible come true - restarting international cricket as early as the month of July. However, this raises the question - are boards being over-ambitious and taking things too fast? 

Should things go ahead as planned, England and West Indies will be squaring off in a Test match in exactly 27 days’ time. Taking the mandatory 14-day quarantine period into account, it would give the whole squad approximately 14 days to prepare, train, regroup and get ready to play a rigorous five-day encounter. Not only would it go against the ICC’s guidelines and the general notion of giving players between 5-8 weeks of preparation to get rid of the rust, but it also raises questions about the preparedness of the host board.

The Premier League, for instance, are planning to get back on June 17, but multiple rounds of Tests were conducted on over 1000 personnel before the decision was finalized. The ECB and CWI, on the other hand, despite having come to an amicable agreement between them, have done little in planning for the worst-case scenario. The move brims of impatience and, in all fairness, has left the door open for a catastrophic outcome. 

Working hard to bring cricket back to our television sets at the soonest is indisputably the right move, but by planning to delve right into international cricket, boards might just be stretching things a tad too far. “If you’re going to risk it all and play cricket, you might as well do it between two international sides,” is a pretty just and valid argument, but what’s not being taken into account is the stakes that come along with international cricket. Using a series between two elite international teams as a platform to experiment, as straightforward as it sounds, might just not be the most sensible of things to do; the risk factor is way too high.

By doing so, the boards are basically putting themselves in a scenario where they are  ‘hoping’ for the worst to not happen. God forbid a player from a visiting side tests positive or shows signs of sickness, what will the boards do? Will they call off the Test or will they be willing to carry on, in turn, risking the health of every other player involved? Should such a scenario occur, what is the guarantee that the visiting side will not threaten to pull out of the tour, fearing for their safety?

Not only would it put the health of everyone involved in jeopardy, but it could also potentially end up doing significant damage to the cricketing relationship between the two countries, despite the situation arising due to a mere accident. Experimenting the Trial and Error methodology with rules in international cricket is one thing, but the moment you delve into unknown territory without having a solution or a back-up plan at hand, you’re asking for trouble. 

But there might just be a feasible solution worth exploring that might pave the way for teams to slowly re-start international cricket - arranging high-profile intra-country matches and using those games as experimental rats to test the feasibility of restarting the sport. Silly as it sounds, it might be a plan that could work like a charm for boards (at least the big three, for starters) - both in terms of identifying the challenges involved and in terms of getting the TV revenue started. 

The idea is simple: you shortlist a total of 40-50 top players from the country, fly them to a biosecure environment (maybe to a state in ‘green zone’ where there is a minimal spread of the virus), split them into different teams, pit them against each other and make them play matches for two to three weeks. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a ‘conventional’ tournament - a new team could be used every single match, the format and rules could be changed for every game and every possibility to make the encounter more entertaining could be explored; the idea is to create an improvised exhibition tournament where for two weeks, you spend your time studying the challenges you face. You then try and work out a solution to solve them. 

Not only will this help the players get back into shape and get their juices flowing, but it could also provide immeasurable entertainment to the fans back home should it be televised. A country like India, for instance, could bring back the Challenger Trophy and have Rohit, Virat and Rahul lead India Red, Blue and Green respectively and have all the top players partake in the tournament.

Television viewership for such a tournament, one presumes, would go through the roof, given lakhs of Indians watched a competition like the DY Patil T20, which was nothing more than an amateur tournament which had a touch of Hardik Pandya and a few other stars to it. It is no alien territory for Australia, too, who experimented with an intra-squad warm-up game before the Ashes and found enormous success; in fact, Josh Hazlewood, recently, spoke about the possibility of having a full-fledged Australia A vs Australia series should no country visit the Aussies in the summer. 

Profitability, of course, will be secondary. The idea is to use these matches as a testing ground so that players, boards and organizers will all be well-equipped to handle the worst and weirdest of scenarios when they hit the international stage. However, if the boards realize that they can make a buck or two from organizing intra-country games, then there’s no reason for them not to. The added advantage that comes along with intra-country games is that all power and control will be centralized, so things cannot get ugly; it is like revision exams held by schools in their campus before they send their children out to the board exams. 

But the bitter truth is that fans - and sometimes even former players - can throw as many innovative ideas as they want, but at the end of the day, the only people whose call matters are the ones in charge of the sport. And as of this moment, every ounce of evidence available suggests towards boards taking the aggressive route, risking it all to get the sport underway at the earliest. Only time will tell if the risk is a smart manoeuvre or a fatal misstep. 

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