Road to India 2023 is blocked for Guernsey
GUERNSEY have been left without an official ICC 50-over tournament for the next two-and-a-half years under the new qualification pathway announced for the Cricket World Cup 2023.
The revised structure caters for the top 32 ranked nations and brings an end to the World Cricket League, replacing it with a three-tier CWC structure topped by the Super League followed by League Two and the Challenge League, which is the entry point of the ‘Road to India 2023’.
Although Guernsey are one of five nations officially ranked joint 32nd in the global 50-over rankings, for the purposes of the first Challenge League cycle, Italy will take the 32nd spot by virtue of finishing fourth at the ICC WCL5 2017 tournament in Benoni, South Africa, where the Sarnians finished sixth.
‘Those teams who were in WCL Divisions Three and Four [after the Benoni tournament] will get spread across Challenge League groups A and B with six teams in each. Italy, by virtue of reaching the third place play-off in Benoni, get a stay of execution,’ said Guernsey Cricket Board chief executive Mark Latter.
‘They will play each other across the next two-and-a-quarter years, starting in August 2019, and there will be 15 games each. We have not found out how that’s going to work yet, but it will mean a lot of travel across that period and could see, for example, Jersey going to Vanuatu for a couple of games.
‘In a nutshell, we are not in that structure for this cycle and what we do now in terms of how we get into it for the next cycle is something we expect to find out in the next few days.
‘At the end of the initial cycle, the bottom two nations in each [Challenge League] group would drop into a play-off and be joined by four other sides to make eight.
‘How the ICC are going to determine the other four sides is what we are waiting to hear now. They could do it from regional tournaments, but seeing as Europe is stronger than other regions going by the rankings I’m not sure how that would work.
‘Not withstanding the disappointment of not being in the CWC struture, there is a financial aspect as well because if they go back to funding by on-pitch performance and where you are in the rankings, not being in the 50-over structure could affect us and we could see quite a big funding drop – who knows?’
More in Wednesday's Guernsey Press.
