For Ireland, Long Road to an Exclusive Cricket Club
By HUW RICHARDS
Little is more exasperating to the cricket fan or administrator than a rain delay. But even as stoppages truncated the early stages of Ireland’s match against Scotland in Dublin this past week, Cricket Ireland chief Warren Deutrom could see some saving graces.
“We’ve got a nice group of young fast bowlers coming through,” he said after Craig Young in his debut and 20-year-old Graeme McCarter had ripped through Scotland’s top order, “and that’s very encouraging.”
Their arrival is another step in Ireland’s long, patient progress toward its declared ambition of becoming the 11th member of cricket’s elite — the group of nations permitted to play five-day test matches.
“The test countries are exclusive in the best and the worst sense,” Deutrom said. “The best because test cricket is the best cricket, and that is something to which you should aspire. The worst because it seeks to exclude and does not encourage the expansion of the game in other countries.
“I don’t think anybody is going to ask us in,” he added, “so we have to build up an unanswerable case for admission.”
Ireland’s standing as the top country outside the elite is hardly in doubt. It tops the regular season standings in the Intercontinental Cup, the competition based on four-day matches for the top non-test nations, and will play in the final later this year, seeking its fourth championship in five tournaments.
It has already won the World Cricket League, the one-day international championship for nontest nations, and secured a place in the 2015 World Cup. There, it will aim to build on earlier triumphs like eliminating Pakistan from the 2007 tournament and defeating England in 2011.
Now it needs to show that its progress is sustainable, and not merely the product of a single generation of unrepeatable talent. Young pacemen are arriving to replace Trent Johnson, who has retired, and Boyd Rankin, who has chosen to qualify to play for England.
“There are still players around from the team who beat Pakistan in 2007, but several have retired,” Deutrom said. “We had a new group in 2011 with players like George Dockrell and Paul Stirling, and now we’re seeing another wave.”
So the talent is coming, but a greater challenge is developing infrastructure to sustain it at home. Without serious domestic cricket in Ireland, the best players — like Dockrell and Stirling — gravitate to professional contracts with county teams in England.
Hence the creation this season of a new Irish competition, encompassing all three formats of the game. Leinster, based around Dublin, was the clear victor, and Deutrom saw enough good cricket to be optimistic.
“That’s our first-class structure in embryo, but we don’t want to hurry things,” he said. “We’ll probably want to wait for a couple of years and see how it develops before we apply to the International Cricket Council for first-class accreditation.”
I.C.C. will also want proof of cricket’s popular appeal in Ireland, and here, too, the evidence is building. The spectacular growth of a game once caricatured as a pursuit of “Western Britons” and “English wannabes” — neither flattering in an Irish context — was shown by the sellout crowds at Ireland’s one-day international against England in Dublin this month.
“We were able to sell 10,000 tickets on a working day in September,” Deutrom said. “We had great media exposure, with broadcasters from Asia. There was fantastic corporate support — we sold 650 places and could have sold many more. The president was there. We ticked every box.”
Those numbers reflected Irish progress since Deutrom, previously with the I.C.C., became chief executive in 2006. Player numbers have tripled to 40,000. Cricket Ireland’s annual revenue has risen to €4.2 million, or about $5.6 million, from €250,000. By comparison, England’s revenue last year was £111 million, or about $175 million.
Ireland played well, but was beaten in a manner reflecting another obstacle. England won, thanks to two Irishmen in its ranks. Rankin took four wickets while batsman Eoin Morgan, playing on the ground where he grew up, scored 124 not out.
It can be argued that both are better players because of their involvement in England’s elite development program. But, Deutrom argued, that cannot be proven.
He pointed out that both players joined the England program with international experience. England, he said, does not know what their young players can do “until they try them at international level. Boyd and Eoin had already proved it with Ireland.”
All of which makes preventing further defections a matter of urgency. And all-rounder Kevin O’Brien, scorer of a century in the World Cup victory over England, has become one to watch.
“He’s a template for what we can do,” Deutrom said.
O’Brien lives in Ireland and plays there as well as in the Caribbean and Bangladesh Twenty20 competitions. That, Deutrom said, proves “you don’t have to go England to play cricket professionally.”
Ireland will not rush into its application for test status, but there is no question that it is coming, most likely before the end of the decade.
When it does, Deutrom would like the established nations to look at the consequences of exclusivity.
“Something that stagnates or seeks simply to maintain itself can only shrivel and die,” he said.
Cricket’s rulers cannot say they have not been warned.
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