England white-ball captain Eoin Morgan has thrown his backing behind T10 being the format cricket should attempt to get included in the Olympics.
The question of whether cricket could be included in the Olympics has been running almost as long as the time that has passed since its last appearance, at the 1902 Olympics in Paris.
On that occasion, England and France contested a two-day, two-innings contest, but with many more teams likely to want to participate, a shorter format will surely be needed.
The length of a cricket match, with even a T20 taking twice as long as a game of football, for example, has often been cited as a practical barrier to the sport’s inclusion at the Olympics. The global sporting competition is traditionally two weeks long, under a third of the length of last summer’s Cricket World Cup. The short length of a T10 tournament is one of the key reasons it would make a good fit for a multi-sport competition, in Morgan’s eyes.
“The one thing that T10 offers above the three formats that makes it so appealing to an Olympic games or a Commonwealth games is the fact that you can play a whole tournament in the space of 10 days,” he said.
The arguments made for cricket’s inclusion in the Olympics by proponents of the idea are many, with one being the potential to lure in an untapped audience by virtue of the platform offered by the showpiece event. In Morgan’s view, the short, sharp nature of T10 makes it perfect for capturing a newcomer’s attention.
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“When you can play a cricket tournament in eight-10 days it really does make it appealing, and on top of that it really would be extremely entertaining,” he said. “We’ve seen in all of the seasons of the Abu Dhabi T10 so far, it’s been exceptionally entertaining. There was that factor that if you flick the TV on you would see something entertaining, and you would see a number of icons of the game playing throughout the day.
“Another one of the appealing things about the tournament over one of the other three formats is that [with the other formats] when you purchase a ticket or you turn the TV for a certain day’s play in cricket you might get to watch your favourite batsman or one hero player, whereas with T10 you get to have a look at three, maybe even four games at a push on one particular day, and every team has an icon or one high-prized professional player that people want to come and watch, that’s extremely appealing.”
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At the 2022 Commonwealth Games, to be held in Birmingham, cricket will feature for the first time since 1998, with eight women’s teams to contest a T20 competiton.
Eoin Morgan was speaking as part of the date announcement for the 2020 Aldar Properties Abu Dhabi T10, scheduled for November 19-28 at Zayed Cricket Stadium, Abu Dhabi
