Even as prominent figures in cricket question the relevance of ODI cricket, raising concerns about its future in the face of T20’s dominance and corporate influence, Phil Walker writes about why abolishing the format could be catastrophic for the game.

Just the other week we had Matthew Hayden, in full-bore no-bullshit mode, calling for “agitation” and “visionary thinking” around the programming of cricket because, get this: “The majority of it is irrelevant”. Next up we had Mark Nicholas, inaugurating his tenure as MCC president with the announcement that bilateral ODIs may as well be scrapped because, come on guys, “In a free market the most money wins – and that’s just the endgame”.

Soon enough it was Joe Root, emerging from England’s last-but-one mess to wonder if “the 50-over format is relevant any more anyway” – amid reports that the ICC will be meeting next month, just as soon as this piddling tournament is sorted, to discuss what’s left of the format’s future.

All of this in a single week – week three of the actual World Cup. A week, incidentally, that saw Afghanistan beat two former world champions and the Dutch skittle the most devastating batting line-up in the game, but whatever, that’s just the sideshow.

Do other sports flagellate themselves in public like this? Openly discuss its demise in the middle of its own flagship event? Does no one else think this is just a little unhinged? Tune in tomorrow folks, 09:30BST, for more exhausting acts of wilful self-harm! (My theory, for what it’s worth: cricket’s craven defeat to corporatism brings on a psychic state so debilitating that the shame has to spool out somehow.)

“Scheduling 50-over cricket alongside T20 continues the death knell of the ODI game,” says Nicholas, who presumably sees little conflict between dinner-party catastrophising about the fundamental structures of international cricket and his day job as the ICC’s chief TV evangelist. And if, as is very possible, he’s merely echoing the timid position of this month’s paymasters, then what does that say about them? Has the ICC actually given up? Extracted its last remaining teeth and thrown in the towel?

Inertia runs through them, a kind of weary acceptance of their fate. “In terms of the free market, from a competition point of view, there’s no way you can stop it,” Wasim Khan, the ICC’s general manager for cricket, told me recently. Seeing the winds roll in, they’re powerless to steer their force or direction.

The US now has its own private league, and Saudi Arabia isn’t far behind. The latter will happen, and soon. And when it does, three months long, the latest plank in the grandest sportswashing campaign ever staged, the takeover, as hostile as you can get, will be complete. All the while, IPL owners talk of the ‘dream’ of owning their players full-time and loaning them out to national boards as they deem fit. The notion that any of this is happening to benefit the game is laughable. A game, it turns out, can be bought.

Searching for crumbs, Wasim was at pains to point out that bilateral cricket is still the “platform” for you to get noticed. “Very rarely do you get players out of domestic cricket saying, ‘Do you know what, I’m going to bypass this area here, and head straight up there’. Ultimately your performances in white-ball cricket on an international stage get you noticed, in order to elevate you, to get you seen by some of the big tournaments and franchises.”

And there it is, unwittingly nailed: International cricket is now the ‘platform’ from which a player can elevate themselves. No longer the destination, but the runway.

For the best players, so the theory goes, what joys. Untold pay dirt. The well-heeled few who have the choice will probably not begrudge the demise of ODI cricket. Root’s comments, one suspects, merely echo the general tenor in that dressing room – and you can draw your own conclusions about the impact that may have had on their rather iffy performances. But what of the rest, the less fortunate majority who make up cricket’s ecosystem?

The argument runs that if 50-over cricket isn’t watched and sold as profitably as once it was, then who cares if it gets subsumed by what Nicholas calls the “supernatural power” of 20-overs and ends up as “World Cups only”?

So let’s think what that means in practice. The World Cup Super League – which has provided context and jeopardy to ODI cricket across the last four-year cycle – abolished. The entrenching of a multi-tiered system whereby the likes of the Netherlands and Ireland, not to say Scotland, the UAE, Namibia etc, are held back in perpetuity. The deepening stratification of cricket in the West Indies. Three-match ODI series against the plumper Full Members cancelled, and with it, the collapse of numerous central revenue streams. And then we come to the players themselves, starved of actual cricketing progression, forced instead to subsist on a bloated diet of marginal 20-overs until they run out of love for the whole affair and do something else with their lives.

No one is saying that ODI cricket is untouchable. It lacks the tension of Tests and the thrills of T20s. A hundred overs in a day is a long stretch, especially when some games can effectively be settled hours out from the close, as this peculiarly lopsided World Cup has shown.

A personal view is that 40 overs a side is the sweet spot. Yet still: the men’s World Cup remains, for now, the biggest tournament in cricket. It’s still the most-watched international event in the cycle. It’s still the defining few weeks in the professional lives of Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. Gravitas can’t be measured in cash. Lose bilateral ODIs and we’re ultimately consigning the whole show to the bin. It would be catastrophic for cricket’s diversity, diminish the fan experience, and contort the game ever more. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

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