Ireland to lobby ICC over T20 World Cup

Cricket Ireland will be lobbying the International Cricket Council to ensure that there is no ‘cross-over’ round in next year’s ICC World Twenty20 in Bangladesh.

16 teams will play in the 2014 tournament, which is scheduled to be played between 16 March 16 and 6 April, with six associate and affiliate sides facing the two lowest full member countries (currently Zimbabwe and Bangladesh) in a preliminary group.

The two countries coming through the preliminary group will then proceed into the group stage proper with the top eight ranked teams.

Zimbabwe and Bangladesh are lobbying hard for the retention of a ‘cross-over’ round, where the winner of the first preliminary group will then play the runner-up of the second, and vice-versa.

The full member minnows, aware of the threat of Ireland and Afghanistan in particular, are keen to gives themselves a second-chance option should they fail to win the group.

Ireland high-performance director Richard Holdsworth says the ICC annual conference in London on 25-29 June will discuss whether to retain the “cross-over round”, and feels Ireland will back scrapping it in favour of allowing the winner of each preliminary group in Bangladesh to qualify directly for the group stages.

“Any team in that first phase needs to back themselves to win. We don’t expect to go to a ten-team second phase with all the full members, having not beaten one of Bangladesh or Zimbabwe,” he said.

“There is a meritocracy in that schedule that allows the best two teams out of that preliminary group to get to the second phase.”

He also played down the significance of suggestions in the Bangladesh media that the ICC have put South Africa on stand-by to host the tournament.

Two of the four venues are not yet complete, in Sylhet and the brand new stadium in Cox’s Bazar, with Bangladesh Cricket Board President Nazmul Hasan admitting that “the ICC consultant who visited Bangladesh recently is not satisfied with what he saw.”

Holdsworth says that the ICC always have contingency plans ahead of international tournaments, and believes that Bangladesh’s problems with infrastructure are not unusual.

“I am aware that South Africa are a contingency – they have been in the past as well for other World Cup events,” he said.

“Iin the past, in several countries that have held events, many grounds have been unbuilt twelve months before the event. That happened with the West Indies in 2007. But these things turn around quickly when the pressure is on.

“We have not heard anything that suggests there is a chance the tournament will be moved.”