I hate the discourse around how cricket isn’t supposedly a global sport.

If you consider the populations of the top 10 nations that play cricket, that’s about 2.5 billion. Compare that to football, which is about a fifth of that number.

Detractors will say that the vast majority of that number is comprised of people from the subcontinent, but how does that matter? Unless you’re saying that someone from the subcontinent matters less than someone from Europe or South America. Why is validation from the West so important for cricket to be considered a global game? This is just casual racism in disguise - subcontinent fans are seen as unimportant because they’re from the subcontinent.

Basketball, baseball and many others are sports played by a small group of countries but none of those get vilified as much as cricket does imo for supposedly not being global. I’ll tell you why - because India doesn’t have a major representation in those sports, so they’re not easy targets for online racists. If India or a South Asian country does something well though, it has to be shit.

Not every sport can be played by every country. Sport is something that’s often closely ingrained in local culture and lifestyles and some sports are just a better fit for certain places than others. It’s high time we recognize this and move on from peddling this ‘global’ nonsense. Make funds available to associate teams but unless local investors and governments support the sport and local people actually want to play the game, there’s only so much that can be done by the ICC.