Up the Leprechauns !!
A cause for genuine congratulations to the Ireland Cricket Team.
The defeat of Bangladesh by Ireland means that Eire now moves into the group of countries which will play in the official One Day International championship.
Once an Associate has played at least 10 ODIs in total, it has the opportunity to be promoted to the main table. To gain this promotion, the Associate must either achieve two wins against Full Members, as Ireland has done against Pakistan and Bangladesh, or achieve one win against a Full Member and also have won more than 60 per cent of matches against other Associates.
Currently, the table is made up of the ten Full Members plus Kenya.
In accordance with a previous ICC Board decision, Ireland has ODI status until 2009, a status also enjoyed by the top six Associate Members, the others being Kenya, Scotland, the Netherlands, Canada and Bermuda.
As the poster says, luck had nothing to do with it …. Ireland have played superbly.
Notwithstanding the fact that they have messed up nearly everything else, the ICC’s long term strategy of encouraging the smaller cricketing nations to play more internationally has borne fruit. Incompetent, politically driven apparatchiks thay may be - but they got this one right.
So we can now look forward to Ireland thrashing England at cricket at Lords in 2008. Hmmmm.
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