WCL ends

I've often sung the praises of the World Cricket League (WCL), which I consider one of the most rational competition formats in all of world sport. It was responsive to rapid improvement, didn't lock in representation for any particular region, gave frequent international experience to teams at all levels, was beautifully regular and symetrical, and fairly gave reward for results.

The WCL era is ending.

There is a new system in place for the 2023 World Cup in India. It, too, is pretty reasonable. The 12 full members plus the top teams from the last WCL divisions filter through tournaments to select the WC2023 qualifiers.

Which is fine for WC2023 but it is not clear what mechanism will be feeding in to the WC2027 qualification process in the absence of the World Cricket League. I hope whatever is put in place is at least as good as the WCL.

Why are they dropping this, is it down to costs? Seems a backward step in terms of developing cricket in emerging nations (and as we’ve seen with Afghanistan, a country can fly through the ranks pretty quickly to join the big boys). I hope this doesn’t cut lots of countries off from international cricket.

Here's a little diagram showing how the WCL will feed into the new system.
At one point, the WCL had 8 divisions, and there were 52 teams in the international structure, which even I admit is pushing it. This was whittled down to 5 divisions which will now be replaced by the clunkily named Super League, League 2, and Challenge League. There'll be 32 teams in the international structure.

One was that the new system will be better than the old is that whereas the WCL divisions tournaments were played during a week at one location, hosted by one of the competing teams, each of the new Leagues will be a slow rolling home and away round robin, which could be considered fairer.

http://dazvoz.com/iccu.jpeg

A lot of travelling though, potentially, for some countries without much in the way of financial resources?

Yeah if the ICC funds it properly is the run. Not like their short of cash.