Jonah58 wrote:ChrisQ wrote:- No current test nation was ever granted test status without some form of domestic multi-day cricket first. All of them from what I can gather had 3-day domestic cricket before becoming test nations except South Africa which had a 2-day competition (which might account for the reason why they were so bad after getting test status). Bangladesh had 3-day (but not first-class) divisional group matches for their national cricket league in 1999 and probably had such matches going back to at least 1997 (in which year they had a 3-day final which was not first-class).
First-class cricket only began in Bangladesh after it was awarded Test status, with the National Cricket League making its debut in 2000-01 (although the competition was actually set up the previous season on a non-first class basis). http://icc-cricket.yahoo.net/the-icc/ic ... BANGLADESH
this was at the point that India and Pakistan were pushing for Bangladesh to become a full member, funds from the ICC were used to create the divisional structure.
Zimbabwe is harder to qualify, the Logan cup yes has been around since Lord Hawke took a team there in 1899, but prior to gaining full member status much of the development of Zim cricketers was done by participation in the Currie Cup in SA.
Even now Ozias Bvute, the managing director of Zimbabwe Cricket says that & I quotethe priorities for Zimbabwe cricket going forward, which are to build a sustainable domestic structure that will enable the team to hold its own in future ICC events
I see most of what I wrote was lost on you.
I never said Bangladesh had a first-class structure before test status (they did have first class cricket from the 1950s-1971 but as part of Pakistan). I did say that Bangladesh had a multi-day competition before test status. Whatever the ICC did in 1999 almost certainly didn't apply to this 1997 match: http://static.cricinfo.com/db/ARCHIVE/1 ... Y1997.html
And I've talked with some Bangladeshis who told me that in the lead up to that period for the reintroduction of multi-day cricket (1997 and afterwards) Bangladesh itself instituted a league involving 2-day cricket with each innings being 90 overs (maximum presumably after which there would be a mandatory declaration as happens in some leagues around the world).
Note that this 3-day final competition in 1997 and the 2-day cricket from the late 1990s was before Bangladesh played in the 1999 World Cup (the usual time people claim was the pivotal moment for Bangladesh becoming a full member).
With Zimbabwe it's beside the point whether their best XI played in the Currie Cup or not. If South Africa had vanished one day and the Currie Cup with it, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe would still have had the Logan Cup. The undeniable fact is that Rhodesia (and later Zimbabwe) had the Logan Cup from the 1900s and I'm fairly certain that up until the late 1960s at least it was played as multi-day cricket. The prominence of the Currie Cup is because:
- South Africa was a former test nation and so its competitions were more newsworthy. Newsworthy items are more likely to last the test of time and end up on the internet or as part of summaries in articles that deal with these things historically. For instance one can find who won the Currie Cup in 1972 (two years after South Africa were kicked out by the ICC - see: http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=Uu ... -cup&hl=en and this in a Scottish newspaper) but trying to find who won the Logan Cup in any year before the 1980s makes Mission: Impossible look easy.
- during the era of apartheid and test exclusion South Africa sought to stage cricket matches with teams from outside South Africa. Hence there was no way the old UCB was ever going to kick Rhodesia out of the competition at any point whilst at the same time trying to get rebel teams to tour.
- Rhodesia in general gets less coverage than South Africa (try looking for books on South African cricket versus Rhodesian/Zimbabwean cricket, better yet try finding any book on cricket in South-West Africa/Namibia - most references will only talk about a South-West African team playing in South Africa's competition and not talk about domestic cricket within SW Africa itself).
- In Rhodesia, cricket was (like in South Africa at the time) mainly played by whites. Unlike South Africa though, whites in Rhodesia never amounted to more than 5-6% of the population (in South Africa the white population which was the only section eligible to play Currie Cup cricket during apartheid fluctuated between 12-20% in the 1900s usually with a declining proportion as time went by). Thus the number and proportion of (Rhodesian) cricketers in Rhodesia's Logan Cup would have paled in comparison to the number (or proportion) of (South African) cricketers in the Currie Cup.
So whether Rhodesia played in Currie Cup or in the County Championship or Ranji Trophy or whether Bangladesh played 2-day cricket or 3-day cricket, what I said earlier still seems to hold and that is that no nation has ever been granted test status first without multi-day domestic cricket and in the vast majority (if not all cases since Bangladesh seems to have been reintroducing multi-day cricket before the 1999 ICC assistance) they did so on their own initiative.
As it stands now the only non-Test nation I know of that has domestic multi-day cricket is Argentina (which has a traditional North v. South match which lasts 3 days). Ireland doesn't need to wait on the ICC. I'm fairly certain they could institute it tomorrow if they cut some of the 50-over matches and introduced multi-day cricket. After that it would near impossible for Ireland not to qualify for test status since the first-class cricket requirement could then be met by having the ICC adjudge the matches and the competitions first-class (but the ICC can't adjudge such a competition as first-class if it doesn't exist). I don't expect this to happen though because most associates and affiliates seem to be either focused on trying to institute similar domestic structures as happens in the richest full member nations with all the bells and whistles and hence won't attempt to do so without ICC grants or (in the case of Kenya and the Netherlands) they hit a lot of snags ranging from domestic political violence (which scuppered Kenya's attempt to do just what I outlined above) to passive or active opposition from the clubs (which seems to have happened in the Netherlands - so their attempt at 2-day cricket has gotten nowhere years after it was proposed).
