Irish cricket goes ahead

Eoin Morgan's call-up for England duty sets not a bad, but a good example: well, judging previous ones like Joyce, not a precedent of course. Yes, Ireland's loss, that too in the midst of the World Cup qualifiers, but Ireland is anyway going to win the tournament, as long as they have the O'Brien brothers. What's good is that England is more and more looking Ireland as the goldmine: and this gives a superb incentive for players in Ireland to not remain amateurish but to improve their game; once on the international firmament, there's no limit to the money and fame they would enjoy, not to speak of some quality games they would experience. And this slowly leads us to a team full of good players: England can't and won't take all, so slowly Ireland comes into its own and sooner than later becomes a full Test-playing nation in its own right (which it anyway should have done much ahead of Bangladesh, but unfortunately it's the crowds in B'desh which bring in the money).

To compare it with Zimbabwe would be amiss: Zimbabwe couldn't benefit from similar poachings mainly because of two issues. One, Zimbabwe was not the '19th county' for England: it didn't have any kind of development system in place, and still doesn't have. To have someone like the Flower brothers still come out was more fluke rather than any credit to the country's cricket board. Two, there was always the issue of 'home': most in Zimbabwe stayed there and loved the land, loved their country, some the old Rhodesia, some the new Zimbabwe, but anyhow for them playing for England was unthinkable, and of course not at all an incentive.

Even if it soon becomes the most boring and dustbin-consigned format in cricket, what T20 is sure to do is one thing: bring the best from anywhere in the world on one podium, reward them, and in short bring cricket more towards being a club game than one played between nations most times on dead pitches.