Champions Trophy - A critical test for ODI cricket and Pakistan as hosts

Champions Trophy – A critical test for ODI cricket and Pakistan as hosts

Posted by author February 17, 2025 Cricket

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Don’t panic. This is not abnormal. Some global tournaments are anticipated for years. Great stories are trotted out, legendary rivalries are expounded upon, and the good times reminisced. This one feels like it’s been hashed together. But if the place hosting it provides any example, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.

We know why we are all here, of course. Cricket is between men’s World Cup years. Only the World Test Championship final sits on the books for 2025 as a pinnacle event, and there were eyeballs to be squeezed for every paisa/cent/penny they were worth, and sponsors eyeing the ICC from across the marketplace. What sort of rubes would the game’s stewards be if they were going to leave all that money on the table? If 2025 was holding the cricket economy back, the Champions Trophy is a whack of the goatherd’s stick on the backside of this dawdling animal.

The tournament has been sowing its beautiful chaos as far back in time as October 2023. Back then, it was suddenly confirmed by the ICC that final league positions in the men’s World Cup were going to determine qualification for the Champions Trophy, which was a surprise to at least two teams, possibly more, and sparked frantic efforts to avoid finishing in the bottom two.

Since then, the build-up has been enlivened by geopolitical standoffs, harried inter-board communications, confusing press statements, political grandstanding, pragmatic backtracking, and extraordinary anxiety over whether venues will be ready in time, which astute readers will recognise as the time-honoured hallmark of any big sporting event held in a developing nation.

Pakistan has the potential to frame all this chaos and at the end of the tournament hand it back to cricket as a valuable collector’s item. But it also has the potential to deliver a disaster, who knows? Only Pakistan would find itself in a situation in which it is simultaneously celebrating the return of a global tournament to their nation, while simultaneously enduring the shame of being dictated to by India’s oversized cricket economy. That Pakistan are defending champions of a trophy that no one has contested for roughly seven-and-a-half years is also a lovely touch by the cricketing gods. No team has historically brought all of cricket’s contradictions and weirdness to full bloom like Pakistan.

Teams have generally found ways to shoehorn practice ODI matches into the lead-up to this tournament, which tells its own story. You suspect that if the ICC got to make the schedule all over again, it might prefer one in which the Champions Trophy is a T20I tournament, and the ODI World Cup is the between-years filler. In the post-Covid world, ODIs are the format teams have to remind themselves how to play in the approach to a global event. Some players, like Marcus Stoinis, have decided that 50 overs is a lot of bother.

Australia are again the winningest men’s team on the planet, with an ODI World Cup and Test Championship to their name, with another Test final to contest in June. They’ve been cool on this tournament, but did still go to the bother of organising two ODIs against Sri Lanka as de-facto practice games.

There is more heat on other teams, though. India would love to impose themselves in ODIs, as they lick their wounds over not making the Test final. England are out to prove their white-ball golden years are still running hot, despite their crashing out of the last ODI World Cup. South Africa seem to have moved into their losing-in-the-final era, which somehow feels even less fulfilling than their overlong and overwrought losing-in-the-semi-final era. (Get a new gag, bros.)

On top of this, New Zealand want to suggest they are not in decline, the Afghanistan men’s team aim to further establish themselves as a white-ball force, Bangladesh seek their second trip into the semi-finals of a global tournament, and if Pakistan win this thing, we could be in for decade-defining euphoria.

Part of the fun of this Champions Trophy is that it is especially unclear what narratives will take hold. This is partly because it has been decades since ODI cricket has been this peripheral to cricket’s consciousness, but there is also the further complication of our not knowing where the final will be played, or how geopolitics will shape the next few weeks. Then add to all of this the fact that Pakistan, which hosts most of the games, has in cricket tended to specialise in electric mischief.