Let’s start a world away from the World Cup, in Italy. A familiar-sounding sort of story has been playing out in Serie A in the last week or so. Lazio’s owner, Claudio Lotito, has been recorded discussing TV rights with a director at a lower league club. The worst of it, as my colleague Paolo Bandini explains in the latest edition of his always excellent round-up of Italian football, came when Lotito suggested that “something should be done to prevent less famous teams from reaching the top flight”. Those are Paolo’s words. Lotito’s went like this: “We need change. If you bring me up Carpi … if you bring me teams that aren’t worth shit, in two or three years we will not have one lira anymore … in three years’ time if we have Latina, Frosinone, who the fuck will buy the rights? They don’t even know that Frosinone exist.”

Caught and condemned, Lotito remains entirely unrepentant. There is a passage in Tobias Jones’s superb book The Dark Heart of Italy in which he wonders why it is that so many Italians feel able to stomach corruption in their public officials. He recounts a dinner-party conversation he had about Silvio Berlusconi, in which the man he was talking to turned to him and said: “You remember what the Duc de la Rochefoucauld said about hypocrisy? Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue. Think about that. You English are hypocritical because you want to disguise any vices, you always pay homage to virtue. But there is no hypocrisy to most Italians, and none at all to Berlusconi.”

And so to the ICC. Whatever unfolds in the next 41 days, the only verdict that much matters on the 2015 World Cup was reached, funnily enough, in a boardroom in Dubai three months before the tournament had even started. That was on 10 November, when it was confirmed that, whether this cup is a success or not, the format is going be overhauled for 2019. By the ICC’s own flibbertigibbet standards, change was overdue. The size and structure of the cup tends to ebb and flow, and seldom stays the same for more than two editions in a row. We’ve been treated to eight, nine, 12, 14, and 16 team competitions, split into pools four, six, and seven strong, contesting round-robins, quarter-finals, Super Sixes, and Super Eights. It’s almost as if – forgive the blasphemy – the ICC aren’t sure exactly what they’re doing.

In 2019 the cup will be contested by just 10 teams, making it the smallest edition since 1992. The suggestion is that, as in 1992, the group stages will be one long round-robin. At the end of the six-week-long stramash, the top four teams in the standings will go straight into the semi-finals. Oddly though, the rejig isn’t going to make the tournament any shorter. This despite the fact that the single most common complaint about the cup is that it goes on too long. In fact, the 2019 edition is scheduled to feature 48 games spread over 47 days, as opposed to 49 across 44, which is what we’ve got at the moment.

What the change will do is ensure that each of the competing teams gets to play more games – a minimum of nine – and that most of them will be against marketable opposition. Australia are bound to play England, India are bound to play Pakistan. And given the length of the tournament, it seems likely that those games will be spread out, one a day, so that they don’t overlap. All designed with TV in mind. When the ICC’s chief executive, Dave Richardson, was asked whether this change could have taken place any earlier, he replied: “I don’t think in this rights cycle.” This is a man who has given up thinking in cricket seasons and started thinking in TV schedules.

Richardson argues that the change is designed to ensure that “the World Cup itself, the premium event, is played without exception … between teams that are evenly matched and competitive”. Although this sentiment seems to sit a little awkwardly with his earlier remarks that this World Cup will be an exciting one because “there are at least six teams that have a realistic chance of even winning the tournament if everything goes their way,” and that it “is the first time six teams have a reasonable chance”. He didn’t specify which six he had in mind, whether or not England and Pakistan are among them after their respective shellackings last weekend.

You could easily argue that the new format will be an improvement. The return of the round-robin will be welcomed by many, since the consensus is that the ’92 World Cup was the best yet. Certainly it’s the one that evokes the most nostalgia. The cost, of course, is that four teams are going to be cut out of the competition. No prizes for guessing who the unlucky contestants are. Eight of the 10 spots in the 2019 World Cup will go to the top-ranked ODI sides, as of 30 September 2017. Already then, four sides with ODI status – Hong Kong, UAE, Papua New Guinea and Scotland – are denied a shot at automatic qualification. And the chances of four more – Ireland, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh – range from slight to infinitesimal. The rankings gap between the West Indies in eighth place, and Bangladesh in ninth is so great that it’s difficult to see anyone leaping it. Least of all the two bottom-ranked teams, Ireland and Afghanistan. To understand why, we need to take a quick dip into the mechanics of the rankings.

A win against a high-ranking team is worth much more than a win against a lower-ranked one. At the same time, losing to a stronger team doesn’t cause much of a drop, but losing to a weaker one does. So the only way the likes of Ireland and Afghanistan can get into that top eight is by winning matches against teams ranked well above them. They’ve proved themselves well capable of doing that. Which is one reason why those same teams aren’t especially keen to play against them. Richardson has admitted that “it’s difficult to guarantee matches” for the lower-ranked sides. He is hoping that they’ll get between “eight and 10” ODIs per season. Whereas in 2014 Sri Lanka played 32 and England 25. Of those eight to 10 games for the lower-ranked sides, Richardson says that a lot of them will be “amongst themselves”. And those, of course, are the ones that are worth the least in the rankings.

There is one particularly telling little detail in the new book about the Associates, Second XI: Cricket in its Outposts. Since Ireland’s success in the 2007 World Cup, England have played an ODI against them every other year, a gesture that has been spun as a sign of the ECB’s commitment to helping to grow the game in Ireland. In fact these matches were offered, along with a lot of cash, in return for Cricket Ireland’s agreement not to schedule home ODIs at the same time as England fixtures, for fear that this would undermine the ECB’s own broadcasting rights deal. That was after Ireland managed to arrange home fixtures against both India and South Africa in the summer of 2007. Neither side has been back since.

Instead, in 2018 Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Ireland, and Afghanistan will be thrown into the pot for the World Cup qualifying tournament. Which will be held, incidentally, in Bangladesh, giving home advantage to the top-ranked team among them. There, they’ll have to fight for the two remaining spots in the tournament proper with the six top-ranked sides from the next level down, the World Cricket League Championship. There will also be promotion and relegation between the ODI ranking table and the World Cricket League Championship, so sides like Scotland will have a shot at making the full rankings table.

Thing is, the relegation will only apply to the bottom-ranked associate side. So if, by some chance, Afghanistan and Ireland did managed to leap-frog their way up the rankings table, the lower-ranked of the two could still find themselves being relegated back to the World Cricket League if they happened to lose the play-off. Richardson is the man who has been charged with the unenviable task of explaining the thinking behind it all. Relegation won’t apply to full members, he says, because “they have a cricket economy as cricket-playing countries” so “it makes sense to allow them to continue to play each other bilaterally”.

Richardson also says that the ICC have created a “pathway” for “any Associate Member country to progress through the World Cricket League ranks, get to the World Cricket Championships and then progress effectively into the ODI FTP and therefore qualify for the 2019 World Cup”. And so they have. But it’s a lot tighter and a lot tougher than the route those same teams took to the World Cup in 2007, ’11, and ’15. So tight and tough, in fact, that you’d figure a camel has a better ch

ance of passing through the eye of a needle. The question is, then, how exactly, do you square that with the ICC’s own ‘Strategic Direction’ – stop sniggering at the back – as defined in their own literature: “A bigger, better, global game targeting more players, more fans, more competitive teams. Our long-term success will be judged on growth in participation and public interest and the competitiveness of teams participating in men’s and women’s cricket.” All that starts to sound suspiciously like just so much lip service. It seems rather that ICC are giving with one hand, and taking back twice as much with the other.

There are those who want a smaller, more competitive World Cup. And there are also those who want to see the associate nations taking part in it. You wonder whether the ICC, having accepted that they can’t please all the people all the time, or indeed many of the people any of the time, have settled instead for the altogether more modest ambition of pleasing themselves every time. Let’s circle back to Claudio Lotito’s words, which seem, by comparison, a refreshingly honest appraisal of what’s what as he sees it in Serie A. To paraphrase: we don’t want the small teams, because they’re bad for broadcasting deals, and that’s bad for business. A final line from Jones’s book, “it was reasoning I heard again and again … someone who is transparent about his vices is more trustworthy than someone who is dishonest about their virtues.”

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