Fewer Ashes and more India v Pakistan would make for better cricket in 2015

Osman Samiuddin lays out what he wants to see from the world of cricket this year after an underwhelming 2014.

New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum batting during the first Test match against Sri Lanka at the Hagley Park Oval in Christchurch on December 26, 2014. Marty Melville / AFP

Last year was not an especially good year for cricket.

It began badly, with the Big Three takeover, and did not get much better.

It was the year in which a man implicated in a cricket corruption scandal became the officially recognised head of the sport.

In moments the cricket was good, I am sure, but all I really remember are more whitewashes, more one-sided games and growing disparities between how sides did at home and how they fared away.

This year, let us hope, will be better. Here are five things that would go a long way to making it so.

New Zealand win the World Cup

In typically understated fashion, New Zealand were the team of 2014. Under Brendon McCullum they won more Tests in a year than they ever have but, more importantly, did so home and away and in eminently watchable fashion.

McCullum was immense: two double hundreds, one triple hundred and a 195.

Many others more than chipped in, not least a pace attack not many can match.

Some might think the 2015 World Cup has come too early for them, but, from here, it looks to have arrived at just the right time.

A home triumph – although the final will be played in Melbourne – could be a seminal moment for a small, perennially overachieving nation.

It would also be good for the game for a smaller member of the cricket world to win the game’s biggest event, as Sri Lanka did in 1996.

The fate of N Srinivasan

The game lowered itself when it put in charge a man who was the subject of a Supreme Court investigation into corruption and conflict of interest.

It may be the inevitable result of the direction cricket administration has been moving in since the mid-1990s. In many ways, this had to happen.

The point is not whether Srinivasan is guilty, although the conflict of interest in his running of an Indian Premier League franchise and being head of the Indian board is clear.

The point is that it would be preferable if the International Cricket Council’s top officer were not in a position that gives the impression of a conflict of interest.

As long as he is the game’s head, it can never claim to be a clean sport. Srinivasan stepping down will never happen, but the game would be much brighter if he did.

Less Ashes

This may sound like heresy, but a third five-Test slog between Australia and England in two years is on the far end of the overkill scale. But this is not specifically about the Ashes, because that is a product of the growing myopia of cricket.

All of the sport’s energies, of players, administrators, sponsors and even its media, is directed towards contests between the Big Three. It is a vicious, self-serving circle.

The more they play, the more they are written about, the more they are celebrated and the more they are scheduled to play.

It would be a good thing to put into use some of that Test Cricket Fund – which administrators loved talking about last year and that is, by the way, supposed to kick in this year – to subsidise a four- or five-Test series between two sides from the smaller seven, such as New Zealand and South Africa.

More India-Pakistan

It has been seven years since the two sides played a Test series. In the meantime, they have played just one, short bilateral limited-overs series.

Almost without anyone realising it, it has become as long a detente between the two sides as some of their older ones. The pair did not play for 18 years between 1960 and 1978.

They did not play for a decade between 1989 and 1999, and then not again for five years thereafter.

Sometimes, so heated has it become, that a cooling-off period has felt necessary.

Right now, though, with cricket feeling smaller than ever before, there has been no better time for them to re-start.

On the calendar, the UAE is scheduled to host a series between the two at the end of the year, but such is the political climate it is by no means certain to go ahead. Effort must be put in to ensure it goes ahead, even if, with only two Tests, it feels like an insult to the tradition.

A lower-order revival

This is an annual wish, which this year feels more pressing. New Zealand’s ranking is bound to improve soon, but the other teams at the bottom seem more stuck where they are than ever before.

If the West Indies, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe can somehow become more competitive, then the game will be truly worth watching.

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