County cricket is too broad and diluted and makes it difficult to establish player credentials for Test selection. For example, most cricket fans wouldn't have heard of Ed Smith or seen him in action before he was selected for Test match duties last summer. The same could be said of Andrew Strauss although more may now be seen of him in one-day internationals. Pooling the fringe players in a tournament will give cricket fans a great opportunity to familiarize themselves with the new Test hopefuls.
Interactivity in television and the Internet is growing in popularity. A-Teams are a great source of interest for cricket enthusiasts. Fringe players are often talked about on Internet message boards in relation to Test and ODI selections.
A radical idea to involve cricket fans with access to the Internet will be to establish a website focussing on players qualified for A-Team selection. Direct involvement in the tournament will be established to allow the participating squads to be selected by users of the website. Of course, the player selections for each match would still be the domain of the team captain and coach. This feature, alone, would make the tournament unique and generate considerable interest. The website will host message boards and provide news articles and interviews of the players under consideration for selection. With this purpose in mind, World A-Team has started a cricket discussion forum that has been active since early March 2004. It can be found at
www.world-a-team.com
One of the prime reasons that football in England is so dominant is the amount of media coverage it attracts. Cricket needs to come up with more innovative ideas like Twenty20 to attract more media coverage. World A-Team believes both players and fans will welcome this tournament. It will provide significant news for a hungry worldwide readership, as in the future, the tournament could expand to include emerging cricket nations like Kenya and "All-star" teams from Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. These developments would be very newsworthy, as would the issue of talent depth mentioned earlier. For example, if Australia were relegated to Group B what tremors would that cause amongst the Australian cricket establishment?
As with Twenty20, some sceptics will disapprove of this idea. However, the Twenty20 experiment shows that a variety of different cricket formats and tournaments can increase the appetite of the cricket public.
The nine-day Kenstar Tournament in 2003-04 involved the A-Teams of Sri Lanka, Pakistan and India. Each team played the other twice and then a final. A tournament for A-Teams in the one-day format is already established in Asia and the World A-Team proposal seeks to progress the concept on a global basis.
© Michael Dengler, January 2004. All rights reserved.