Cricket Capital

Fire in Babylon, the 2010 documentary on the West Indies sides of the 1970s and 80s, shows Clive Lloyd uniting players from different Caribbean territories and cricket becoming a source of regional dignity. I argue administrators should watch it too: a team's emotional bond with its people is an asset, and you serve your membership, not yourself. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@cri9259/p...

Players are taking pay cuts, competitions are being reduced, and Cricket West Indies has had to ask the ICC for financial help. I don't think more money fixes it. My view is that West Indies cricket should gradually evolve into separate international teams for countries like Jamaica, Barbados and Guyana. After more than 115 years of international cricket, there are still only 12 Test nations. Righ...

West Indies players have had their salaries cut by 25%, and the cause sits in how the ICC's Future Tours Programme splits the money. Chris Daring, CEO of Cricket West Indies, has called the current revenue sharing model not equitable. I agree with him. Under the current arrangement, the home country keeps almost all the revenue from a bilateral tour, and the reverse applies when the return tour ha...

The ICC announced a 14-team 2027 World Cup, and countries, players and associates planned around it. The new format sends three teams into a preliminary super series where two are eliminated after two matches and never reach the 12-team main group. I'm not buying the ICC's description of that as 14 teams, and I side with the World Cricketers Association, Scotland, the Netherlands and the players w...

Under the ICC's revised 2027 ODI World Cup format, the three lowest-ranked qualified teams will face a preliminary round where only one advances to the main event. Two go home. Scott Edwards, Richie Berrington, Gerhard Erasmus, and Paul Stirling have all spoken out against it, and their objection runs deeper than the format itself. Countries spend years building players and programs to earn qualif...

Cricket Scotland and Cricket Netherlands have gone on record describing the ICC's handling of the 2027 ODI World Cup format changes as disappointing, disrespectful, and a threat to the credibility of international cricket. These are not outside critics. These are ICC members. Their joint statement centres on two core complaints: the format changes were announced with less than 18 months to go befo...

The European T20 Premier League is a new cricket competition bringing together teams from Ireland, Scotland, and the Netherlands, representing cities like Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam. Each of those three countries is a modest cricket market on its own, too small to attract serious broadcaster interest or sustainable sponsorship. Combined, they create a commercial...

Hello everyone. Now, I’ve worked in international cricket for over two decades, and I learned something very quickly. Some of the most important shots in cricket are never played with a bat. And some of the most vicious bouncers are not bowled with a ball. They happen in committee meetings and in boardrooms. I’m Faisal Hasnain, and that side of the game has been a large part of my professional lif...

When the ICC announced changes to the ODI Cricket World Cup 2027 format, the World Cricketers Association pushed back on four specific grounds: transparency, consultation, the sporting logic of the new structure, and the human cost of mid-cycle format changes. The WCA concedes the ICC's authority to shape its global events, but argues that authority and accountability are separate questions, and t...

Sports law is not a single rulebook handed down by one governing body. It is contract law, employment law, intellectual property, anti-doping, and criminal law applied to the specific structures of international federations, franchise leagues, and broadcast ecosystems. Cricket illustrates why this matters: the ICC, national boards like the ECB, franchise leagues like the IPL, broadcasters, sponsor...

The MCC places the spirit of cricket right at the front of its laws, before any rule about how the game is played. The laws tell you what you can and cannot do. The spirit tells you how to behave while doing it. At its core, that means mutual respect: for your captain, your teammates, your opponents, and the umpires. It holds whether you're a Test cricketer or a ten-year-old playing a Sunday villa...

Italy is launching its first city-based franchise T10 league, Italia T10 Cricket, with six teams set to play in Rome later this year. The Italian Cricket Federation has officially endorsed the venture, and matches will be streamed internationally. That combination of private commercial initiative and federation backing gives the league a real foundation to build from. A functioning domestic compet...

Afghanistan, Ireland, and Zimbabwe are full ICC members with test status, yet none of them have been included in the World Test Championship since it began. Reports now suggest that plans to expand the WTC from nine to twelve teams are stalling, with the financial cost of staging test cricket cited as the reason. That excuse doesn't hold up. The ICC already operates a test cricket fund for exactly...

No one owns a sport. Recent developments at FIFA have forced that principle back into the conversation, and it applies just as cleanly to the ICC, the IOC, World Rugby, and every other international governing body worth examining. Administrators are paid employees who hold delegated authority, granted by the members who elect them. That authority can be taken away, and it is easy, when sitting at...

The ICC has formed a governance committee, and my first recommendation is straightforward: read the Woolf Report. Lord Woolf's 2012 report identified serious structural and governance weaknesses in international cricket that remain unaddressed over a decade later. That's not a mark of a complex problem. It's a mark of an institution that hasn't tried hard enough to fix one. Beyond the Woolf Report...

The ICC bills the 2027 Men's ODI World Cup as a 14-team tournament. Follow the actual structure and you arrive at 12. Two associate nations that previously earned six group-stage matches each now play a two-match pre-tournament round-robin, and whichever two lose go home before the main event begins. That gap between the headline number and the reality is worth understanding before debating whethe...

Lord's Cricket Ground is not the home of cricket because someone declared it so. It earns that title quietly, through the weight you feel the moment you pass through the Grace Gates and the noise of London fades. I've stood in grounds across the cricketing world, from the Wankhede in Mumbai to the Bangabandhu Stadium in Dhaka to the modern oasis in Dubai, and every one of them has its own characte...

No other major sport does what cricket does: the surface you compete on physically changes beneath you over the course of a game. A Test match runs five days, and the pitch deteriorates progressively throughout. What plays reliably on day one can be treacherous by day three, with cracks forming, the ball starting to grip and turn, and conditions shifting hour to hour depending on weather, heat, an...

Sir Garfield Sobers first entered my life through his autobiography, King Cricket, which I read many times as a boy growing up in the 1960s and 70s. In that era of no internet and no YouTube, cricket heroes existed only in newspapers, radio commentary, and grainy television replays. Sir Garry and Sir Everton Weekes were, to me, mythical figures. Meeting either of them in person was something I nev...

June 3rd, 2026 marks ten years since Muhammad Ali died, and the tributes still flow from people who never watched a single fight. That staying power has nothing to do with punching speed or heavyweight records. Ali was, as Faisal Hasnain puts it, the conscience of sport itself, a man whose physical gifts were matched, and ultimately overshadowed, by the clarity of his values. At 25 years old and a...

The ICC is investigating the T20 World Cup match between Canada and New Zealand, and the outcome will almost certainly follow a familiar pattern: a player or two gets banned, a statement about integrity gets issued, and the people who actually run match-fixing walk away untouched. Every serious anti-corruption body, from Transparency International to Interpol to researcher Declan Hill, has documen...

A tattered 1949 biography called Bradman, written by Arthur Norris, shaped my love for cricket more than any match I ever watched live. I found it at age ten on my dad's bookshelf and read it a dozen times or more. What it gave me wasn't statistics or grainy photographs, but living presences: Woodfull calm and commanding, Ponsford solid and dependable, Bradman quick and almost superhuman, and Stan...

France Cricket is not recognized by its own national sporting authorities, and yet its representative has been elected to the ICC board to advise on global governance. That single fact is the thread I pull on here, because it raises questions about how international cricket oversight actually works when a member body facing serious unresolved problems can still place someone at the highest table....

Only two cricketers made Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in sport. That small number raised a harder question: if cricket carries so little global influence, what do we make of the claim that it's the world's second largest sport? Cricket administrators have repeated that claim for years, and it has settled into received wisdom without anyone seriously checking whether the...

The ICC posted a $543 million surplus in 2025, and that number made headlines. But measured against the ICC's own projections for its current four-year commercial rights cycle, the picture looks considerably different. The target was roughly $600 million per year in surplus distributed to member boards. Across the first two years, the audited accounts show $474 million and $543 million respectivel...