Ireland handed World Cup reprieve

Cricket:The International Cricket Council completed a remarkable turnaround in Hong Kong today after it was announced that the 2015 World Cup will go back to being a 14-team tournament with a qualification tournament deciding the last four places.

Less than three months after the ICC's executive committee decided on a 10-team format involving just the full member countries and excluding the other 95 affiliated nations, the news comes as a huge boost to the game in Ireland, whose players and officials were in the vanguard of leading condemnation of the original decision.

The decision means that the 10 full members will still automatically take part, while a qualification tournament in 2013 will decide which of four associate nations will travel to the event in Australia and New Zealand.

International cricketing politics are believed to have played a huge part in the about turn, with the upcoming vote on whether to scrap the rotation system for electing the ICC president a key factor.

Pakistan and Bangladesh, the next two nations in line to pick a president, were opposed to any change in the system. In order to pass a resolution amending the rule, eight of the ten full members and 38 of 50 associates would have to vote in favour of the motion.

Speaking to the cricinfo website in Hong Kong, Cricket Ireland chief executive Warren Deutrom admitted he was “delighted” with the decision.

“The board should be greatly commended in the first instance for agreeing to look again at the matter, and then for being courageous enough to review their original decision - that isn’t easy,” said Deutrom, who led the call for a change in the original decision amongst the non full member countries.

Much was made of Ireland’s present ICC one-day ranking of 10th as part of the unfairness of the proposed 10-team event because Zimbabwe, presently ranked 11th, would have qualified automatically for 2015 as a full member.

Looking ahead to the 2019 World Cup, the ICC have agreed that 10 teams will be involved; the top eight from the rankings, with the final two participants coming from a qualification tournament.

After the initial decision was made in April, the ICC increased the next two World Twenty20 finals in 2012 and 2014 to 16 teams, a move that was seen at the time as little more than a sop to the associate nations.

They have now decided to keep the number of participating teams to 12, the same as the previous stagings of the tournament. The 10 full members will qualify automatically, with the final two places coming from a qualification tournament.

Next year’s World Twenty20 will be staged in Sri Lanka, with the qualification tournament expected to be held in the United Arab Emirates early next year. The 2014 event will be in Bangladesh.