Blue Print to Make Cricket The Most Popular Sport

If cricket has to be the most popular sport in the world, ICC needs to make some radical changes.

1. Scrap the ICC futures program

2. Instead, have a world series like Formula one, or a bunch of grand slams like in tennis.

This is how the world series will work, it will involve two divisions, division 1 and division 2.

Division 1 will involve the top 10 teams, every year the team that finishes last gets relegated to division 2 and the team that finishes no 1 in division 2 gets promoted to division 1.

There will be 6 T20 tournaments every year lasting 4 weeks in 8 to 10 different countries and this will be pre-decided. The team that gets relegated has a chance to loose hosting a World Series event.

India, Pakistan, Srilanka, Australia, NZL, SA, England and West indies could host each of the world series event every year. (ofcourse, if one of the teams get relegated then they could loose hosting an event.)

The team that finishes with the highest number of points ends up being crowned world T20 champions.

Winner of each event: 10 points
Runner's up 8 points
Semi finalist 6 points each
Rest of the teams 0 points

3. This ensures teams play 6 months of the most popular form of cricket and they have another 6 months to focus on other forms of cricket.

4. Phase out 50 over cricket after the 2011 WC and give T20 the focus and attention it deserves. The future of cricket is T20.

5. This will give teams enough time to focus on test cricket as well.

6. Create a window for IPL in the international calendar. If IPL can be the 6 largest sporting event in the world, the ICC should use this as a platform to popularize the game.

Let's go ICC... Time for change! Are you up for it?