[zman]

Being from a generation that grew up watching test and ODI cricket, I agree it'd be nice to have as many teams participate in the ODI world cup as possible. But I'll play devil's advocate here because I see what ICC is trying to accomplish and the method to their madness.

They have clearly chosen T20 as the brand of cricket for globalization. After playing test cricket for almost 15 years, we have shown how difficult it is for a new entrant to bridge the gap between them and the G8. In ODI's the gap is smaller but it's still there.

In Basketball, the World cup or the Olympics are the main global tournaments but the NBA is the flagship product. Now basketball has taken long strides towards globalizing the sport, but they're still reluctant to allow teams from other countries enter the NBA because they fear it may dilute the competition. This may change in the future when say UK becomes good enough to put together a team that can compete in the NBA.

It's difficult to compare sports like basketball, football, or rugby to cricket because in cricket you have three different formats and each format is vastly different from the others. In order to compete with other sports on new frontiers and build a foundation for cricket in those countries they needed to decide on a format that's somewhat comparable to the other sports they're competing against. T20 is the format that makes the most sense length wise and also in terms of giving the new teams a better chance to compete. In this age of facebook and twitter and instagram where ppl's attention span keeps getting shorter by the day they'll definitely gain more ground faster and get more bang for their buck by promoting T20 compared to any other format.