That's Just Not Cricket

Earlier today, an England team won the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup. The English squad included one Irishman, one Pakistani, and more South Africans than you can shake a stick at. Despite their reliance on their foreign born players (none of their top three scoring batsmen were born in England), without a doubt this victory will be the source of an infinitely large number of boasts by drunken English yobs for the next while. I am very much looking forward to England getting beaten in the soccer World Cup now.

It does raise the issue of player eligibility though. While Pietersen and Kieswetter never played for South Africa, Morgan did play for Ireland. According to the ICC's rules for player eligibility a player is only eligible if "he has not played Representative Cricket for any other Member Country during the 4 immediately preceding years". This would seem to suggest that Eoin Morgan is very ineligible to play for England, having played with Ireland up to 2007. However there is a catch: 

Cricketers qualified to play for Associate and Affiliate Members can continue to represent that country without negating their eligibility or interrupting their qualification period for a Full Member Country up until the stage that the cricketer has played for the Full Member Country at Under 19 level or above.

So, in other words, if you're from one of the "lesser" cricketing nations, you're fair game to any of the full members (providing of course you've fulfilled the residency requirement).  This to me seems like a ridiculous double standard.

When you add in the non-existent rules about an associate member becoming a full member, this all becomes very haphazard. There is no clear timeline on when Ireland, arguably consistently the best Associate member over the last ten years and definitely the second best at the moment (behind Afghanistan), will ascend to elite status of Full Member. As a result, our best players defect to England for a chance to play test cricket which is denied to them with Ireland. This leaves Ireland with a team which is unable to compete with the test nations (as all the players who are at that level have been poached), which provides the ICC with a convenient excuse to not upgrade Ireland to Full Member.

The hilarious thing is that the ODI and Twenty20 World Cups have shown that so called inferior nations are capable of holding their own against the big boys. I'm sure everyone remembers Ireland's remarkable victory over Pakistan in the 2007 World Cup. That was not an isolated incident. In that same tournament, Ireland drew with Zimbabwe and beat Bangladesh; both full members. Ireland beat Bangladesh again in the Twenty20 World Cup last year and in that same tournament the Netherlands beat England. While this year's World Cup didn't provide the upsets of previous years, the facts remain that Ireland have reached the Super Eights of two World Cups, outdoing many Full Members in the process and are yet no nearer to reaching Full Member status than they were before.

Ireland applied for Full Membership status last year, but the process of that application could take several years to be worked through. The criteria for Full Membership seem quite arbitrary. Improvement in the cricket structure is necessary but a "flexible approach is to be taken and not one based on win rate". The criteria also asks for a strong financial setting, but given that Ireland can't get consistent games against top nations without Full Membership, we can't get the revenue that those tours would bring. Also mentioned is the incredibly vague need for a "cricket culture".

However, even if Ireland do achieve Full Membership and eventual test status, Morgan would need to have not played with England for four full years before he can put on the green again. After the ease of his defection to England, how does this seem fair? Surely, the ICC should include an exemption for players returning to their original Associate Member nations, particularly if they have just gained full membership status. The presence of that experience in the Irish squad would improve the standard of the entire team no end.