So it seems the 'administrators' of the game have decided that their role is not in fact 'to minister to' the game of cricket but instead is self-aggrandisement, to play empires, appeal to jingoism and maximise short-term money for their own organisations and in certain cases no doubt personal enrichment too. Given the reigns, they've decided they are no longer servants of the game; instead the game is servant to them.
While your post may appeal to the idealistic child in all of us, it certainly makes the realistic 40-something brain in my head feel sardonic. I will spare you the lecture on how rose-tinted heavenly-hippe your post sounds, so i will just stick to some choice corrections.
1. The job #1 of 'ministering' an entertainment product ( be it sport, reality tv, gameshow,etc) is to make money. If you don't make money, you don't get to exist on what is a limited real estate space (stadiums) and even more limited virtual estate space ( television).
Cricket is a product, it must sell. If it fails to sell, it doesnt get to stay-nay, it doesn't deserve to stay. How do we judge whether cricket sells or not ? by following the money for sponsorships and advertisements. They constitute 70% of the revenue of the sport or more. And those numbers are very clear- it is the limited overs format that is most popular and sells, not the 'test' format that is a relic of the amatuer era.
2. Almost all personnel involved in delivering the entertainment product known as cricket- administrators, coaches, players and support staff- are professionals. To be a professional, implies greed. You are in a profession when you choose to gain financial rewards for the relevant services rendered.
If you wish to persue something with no financial reward in mind, then you are not a professional, you are either a hobbyist or a volunteer.
Since the personnel involved in cricket are professionals, the uber-honchos of cricket owe it to them to seek avenues to gain greater financial benefit for all the professionals involved with the game.
As such, to persue policies that enrich cricketers, is to further the game, as you cannot enrich cricketers without increasing outreach.
As per the other FTP thread, we need to consider the ICC's purpose; once The Goal of the organisation is understood then all means are arranged around the achievement of that goal. The Goal is in the name: International Cricket Council - the goal is Cricket. Money is not The Goal, it is merely a necessary condition to achieve that aim. Some business sensibilities are required to ensure the game can stand up economically, but for these to overwhelm the purpose of the organisation is the tail wagging the dog.
The goal of furthering cricket involves getting more fans for the game. This automatically leads to further enrichment of the people involved. The game exists to make money and be a financiall competetive product to compete with other entertainment products.
There is no way Cricket is best served by this proposal; any cursory examination of the dynamics involved would forecast that the nations outside the top 3 will be marginalised, resulting in the self-perpetuating cycle of a loss of interest and competitiveness. In the short term this represents a revenue increase for the top 3 (play each other more often) and a cost saving (don't have to play other nations). In the medium to long term it means one by one the marginalised nations fall victim to that negative feedback loop are no longer functional - and it's very hard to reverse that. That's bad enough - the goal spectacularly not achieved in those countries. What's left of the international game of cricket is robbed of it's diversity, and whether people in the big three countries are satisfied still getting served up the same **** sandwich year after year is a further question (probably are tbh).
This is true but your analysis is rendered meaningless without considering the fact that the 3 markets that are colluding to further their cause are the top 4 markets in the world currently for cricket ( the real 2nd largest market, Pakistan, is unteneble in the immediate future due to socio-political reasons).
Of these 3 markets, one market (India), constitutes 80% of the entire market.
To persue policies that will further the cause of the sport in the dominant market, even if it comes at the detriment of the fringe market, is the standard & logical policy of any business venture. Coca-Cola makes Coke to sell it to the millions of city dwellers. Not the nomads of Mongolia. Hollywood makes movies with an eye on their popularity in the theatres in New York, not their popularity in the drive-ins in middle of Alabama. Cricket is no different.
Ideally ofcourse, everyone would like to win but sacrificing the smaller market for gains in the bigger market is the logical choice to further the sport.
Test cricket is the other component that is marginalised and possibly eventually left to die. While I love test cricket, I appreciate that many particularly outside this forum do not. That's ok. However the test format is the wellspring from which a depth of expertise, passion and skills flows downhill to the T20 format. It's a marine reserve that spills over to make the surrounding fisheries profitable. It's the repository of expensive and experienced seniors that a company must keep around because they're the ones that understand the company and it's clients. It's the fine wine that people move into when they're no longer satisfied with sweet cordial, and then they sit around discussing the ins and outs of that fine wine for hours afterwards and go to wine-tasting events and make up flowery words to describe it. But this is not just flowery talk - get rid of test cricket and you gut the cricket world of the people that care most about the game and provide much of the interest and expertise that makes it work - that's a monumentally stupid strategy from any perspective.
A weird analogy that I couldn't disagree with more. Test cricket is not the venerable experienced seniors pool who are the best paid policy-makers of the company. Test cricket is more akin to the intern at a technology firm: their number-crunching is essential but they do not contribute to the bottomline of the company directly, are underpaid and always squeezed out.
What Test cricket (and by extension, FC cricket, which really are the same format with differing timeframe allocation) is, is the training ground of temperament and technique for the format that really matters: limited overs cricket, the format due to which cricket exists today. And that is why Test cricket will not die out completely but just as an intern doesn't run the company, neither should Test cricket be central to cricket.
Cricket, as a sport defined as two teams of 11 players taking turns (sometimes multiple turns), with one team intent on bouncing a ball on the ground at the direction of 3 sticks (wickets), while other team tries to whack the ball with another stick(bat), always out in duos and retain their right to keep whacking the ball (ie, not get out),had existed before the format of test cricket and will exist after it too. Cricket exists today due to the largesses of the limited over format and as far as Test cricket is concerned, cricket exists despite of Test cricket, not due to it.
Particularly when there's already masses and masses of lowest-common-denominator entertainment out there. On that note, it's a fantasy that domestic T20 is going to become big in England and Australia; two countries that are already super-saturated by dominant domestic football codes with broad-based passionate appeal. And if we must use market-speak, frankly T20 is just not as good a product as those football codes. It's taken hold in India most likely because cricket already held a privileged position and didn't have quite so much competition as elsewhere. And forget other markets like the US that are themselves hyper competitive for the sporting entertainment dollar. Any realistic proposal for the good of the game needs to accept as a starting point that the Indian market does and is always likely to make most of money, and the IPL is a big part of that, and then move forward from there. Domestic T20 elsewhere will continue to be attended by people mildly interested in a bit of light amusement and a beer or two on a balmy summer night - not people that care passionately about a result one way or another.
The excellent success of the BBL in Australian market has gone to prove that 20/20 certainly has the potential to break into and one day dominate the Australian market. As for England- oh England! Just like with 50 overs cricket (which is the top earner for ECB, not Tests. Shocking!) England too will yet again prove the adage of 'better late than never'.
Besides, cricket is participated in as a highschool sport in over 80% of Canadian highschools and not just by south asian or caribbean kids. While it is true that the 'big four plus two' of the sporting world dominates the north american sporting entertainment scene ( Baseball, Football, Basketball, Ice Hockey, Golf and Tennis, respectively), it is nowhere close to the locked-in hyper-competetive impossible-to-break-into market that you imply.
MMA has already carved a stunning nitche in the sporting market (if one classifies beating grown men into a bloody pulp as a sport that is) quite well in North America over the last 4 years.
The fastest growing participated sport in North America these days is Lacrosse. The fastest growing sport in North America, in terms of network times, is soccer.
Cricket definitely has potential to break into this market but if it has even a snowball's chance in hell to 'stick' in this market (or markets such as Europe or South America), it will be due to 20/20 cricket, not test cricket, a format nobody in the developed world actually has time to see in its entirity.
And even if we are to concede that expansion into these new markets is a wishful pipe dream, lets look at these two salient facts about the reality of the current cricketing market( you are correct that its had an easy time expanding in the subcontinent due to lack of competition from any other major forms of sporting entertainment):
1. The subcontinent represents, by demographics, over 90% of the current cricketing market.
2. This market has a stunning growth potential, where with the rise of the subcontinental economy, we can safely add anywhere between another 200-500 million viewers in our future lifetimes and 10-100x more participants in the sport.
It is also a well-established fact that the growth of cricket in this market is far more favourable for the limited overs (particularly 20/20) format, not Test cricket.
The uber-honchos of cricket owe it to the game and to the people involved, to implement policies that maximises this potential fanbase and by extension, revenue stream.
The mandate of any administrator of an entertainment product, is to increase its outreach amongst humanity. Not to pander to its traditionalist & static growth base at the expense of the emerging market potential.
Also can the person clogging this thread with ideological the-free-market-is-God babble please **** off. Just so much bull**** that I don't have time right now to ridicule for the counter-to-reality nonsense that it is.
That would be me. I can only leave you with this Churchillian nugget that has reflected my 40+ year of life and its ideological trajectory quite well: If you are twenty and not a communist, you have no heart. And if you are 40 and not a capitalist, you have no brain. I can only hope for your sake that you are not forty yet.