Meh the other Asian sides have just as much right to be annoyed.
I wonder if Australia have already had this in mind for a little while now. Might explain why they keep choosing to bowl first even after they've already won a series. They probably want a bit of a buffer in the rankings before they inevitably go get smashed in India later this year.
Yeah Australia have been smart. NZ too have gone hard. Both teams clean swept their respective series'.
If ICC hadn't used regional rankings, they would have gone with world rankings instead.
The Olympics Committees decided that they would only allow 6 teams. Maybe in the future they could allow 8 teams once they actually see the benefits of having cricket in the games.
I think cricket can only have 6 teams until it becomes a core sport, baseball in Tokyo was the same. There will be a cricket tournament in Brisbane in 2032, then after that who knows, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it'll be back again if the 2036 Olympics goes to Ahmedabad!
Rugby Sevens wasn't. It had 12 teams in 2016 and will have 12 teams in 2028. The gulf between the top dogs there, e.g., Fiji, the All Blacks, and the Blitzboks, and the rest is vast. Fiji hadn't lost a game dating back to 2016 until the final of the 2024 games.
Was rugby sevens added as a core sport from the start though?
Why does it have to be based on region? Why not just the best 8-12 teams regardless.
Might be an IOC thing, I think other team sports use continental qualification systems
It was always a great system because it always implicitly favours qualification from small continents like Oceania. However, now that it's been implemented for cricket I can say with confidence that it's a terrible, unfair system.
