Andy Balbirnie is unhappy with the number of international matches for Ireland
The Ireland national cricket team has held only 5 confrontations over the past six months: first, the Irish lost two T20s to India, and then they drained a three-match ODI series with New Zealand. The captain of the Ireland national team, Andy Balbirnie is unhappy with the number of international matches for Ireland.
It should be noted that Ireland, even though the team failed to win even once this summer, looked great in the battles with India and New Zealand — the Ireland national club gave an incredible fight to powerful opponents.
Ireland is capable of progressing
Andy Balbirnie noted that Ireland is capable of progressing, but it needs to have a large amount of game practice for this. Andy approached the International Cricket Council, requesting more matches for Ireland.
“We played very well against strong opponents — we showed that we can compete with the strongest teams in the world. Yes, we lost, but once again we managed to gain invaluable experience. We want to play more, and the ICC needs to think about giving us more meetings,” Balbirnie said.
Ireland will hold as many as 7 meetings in the T20 format in August
In fairness, in the second half of the summer, the Ireland national team will definitely have no problems with playing practice: Ireland will have to play 3 matches in the T20 format against the powerful New Zealand national team in July. And Ireland will hold as many as 7 meetings in the T20 format in August against South Africa and Afghanistan.
It should also be recalled that the squad will participate in the T20 World Cup in October: Ireland will compete with the West Indies and Scotland in the first stage.
It is likely that fewer matches for the club soon because now a kind of revolution is maturing in international cricket, which will hit the number of matches at the planetary level very hard.
Every year more and more emphasis is placed on the financial profitability of cricket — the sport is turning into a business. One of the engines of this process is the systematic increase in the T20 leagues, the shortest format of the game: there are more and more national championships because there is never a lot of money.
CSA announced the creation of a new T20 league
And now the ICC is facing very serious problems: the CSA has announced the creation of a new T20 league, which is seriously going to compete with the IPL, but the creation of a new major project means that the best players should be involved in it. And recently, an increasing number of players choose the former between participating in domestic leagues and the international format.
The Ireland national team is not a full-fledged top – it is a strong middle-class man who can hardly compete for something serious within the framework of a conditional World Cup. However, as Balbirnie correctly noted, Ireland is capable of surprising and putting sticks in the wheels of obviously more powerful opponents, but the Irish need to constantly have game practice. But modern realities, unfortunately, are such that there are serious difficulties with this.
