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A world cup is almost always the pinnacle of a sport.
The same can and should be said of cricket.
The Cricket World Cup gets underway on Thursday in India, the most populous nation of fervent supporters the game has — a seemingly perfect home for two months of wall-to-wall international cricket.
It should be a time for optimism and excitement. Yet, while those feelings are very much in evidence, there is also an understandable undercurrent of hesitancy.
Not for the first time, cricket is facing one if its many existential crises, with the relevance of the 50-over format being increasingly questioned as T20 franchise tournaments increasingly grow into the main financial drivers of the world game.
"It just feels as though the world of ODI (one-day international) cricket, despite the broadcasters loving it, is getting smaller by the day," former Australia batter Ed Cowan told the ABC Cricket Podcast.
"And this is the moment that it starts to unravel.
"Not to be a doomsayer, but that's not an unrealistic situation.
"Maybe there won't be another World Cup. Who knows?"
More ODI matches than ever, but few of them matter
By looking solely at the number of matches being played, one could be forgiven for thinking that everything is rosy in the 50-over garden.
Since the the last World Cup, 468 ODIs have been played, 302 of them by the 12 full ICC members: Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Zimbabwe.
The problem is, how many of those stand out? Exactly.
The relentless, some have said "meaningless", churn of limited-overs, white-ball cricket has lead to a near constant background hum of cricketing conversation that is now being well and truly drowned out by the all-singing, all-dancing franchise tournaments that have flooded cricket's pool of competitions.
Because, aside from providing a sobering reminder to fans of Test cricket that it is possible to bowl 100 overs in a single day, what is ODI cricket good for?
Prior to the World Cup getting underway there will have been 4,660 official ODIs since the accidental first contest between Australia and England on January 5, 1971 at the MCG.
That dwarfs the 2,515 officially recognised Test matches that have been completed in the 146 years of Test cricket — in just over a third of the amount of time.
This year alone there have been 158 ODIs played, with the 48 matches scheduled for this World Cup ensuring the annual total will be well over 200 for the first time.
And yet, despite that apparent plethora of content, ODI cricket is still being squeezed out by the sheer volume of even shorter versions of the game.
Since England won the 2019 tournament, there have been two T20 World Cups, four seasons of the IPL and Big Bash League, plus 66 other domestic T20 franchise leagues — and that doesn't even take into account the T10 leagues and The Hundred.
In amongst all those tournaments, 459 T20Is have been played by the full ICC members and 164 Test matches, resulting in two World Test Championship finals.
Incorrectly assuming that all those Tests were scheduled for five days, in the 1,542 days since the last World Cup final, those 12 teams have combined for a scheduled 1,581 days of cricket.
That, by any measure, is an awful lot of cricket.
Something, clearly, has to give.
Should ODI cricket be limited to World Cups?
The Cricket World Cup — that is, the 50-over World Cup — is the oldest of cricket's global tournaments, having first been played in 1975.
In theory, there are two World Cups scheduled after this one: 2027 in southern Africa, and with an as-yet unknown host in 2031.
In practice, there must be questions about whether there will still be an appetite for 50-over cricket by then.
The 12 editions of the tournament has given rise to many of the sport's most iconic images and moments: Herschelle Gibbs dropping Steve Waugh in 1999, Ireland beating England in 2011, Kapil Dev raising the cup on the Lord's balcony after India stunned the West Indies in 1983.
Earlier this week, new chairman of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), Mark Nicholas, proposed the best way to ensure the longevity of the format could be to limit its playing to the quadrennial World Cups.
"We believe strongly that ODIs should be World Cups only," Nicholas said in an interview with ESPNcricinfo.
"We think it's difficult bilaterally now to justify them — they're not filling grounds in a lot of countries."
His comments echo sentiments expressed by the MCC's World Cricket Committee, who proposed a less-is-more approach when they met during the Lord's Ashes Test.
"The suggestion is that a scarcity of ODI cricket would increase the quality," the MCC said in a statement.
"[That would be] achieved by removing bilateral ODIs, other than in the one year preceding each World Cup.
"This would, as a consequence, also create much-needed space in the global cricketing calendar."
Timing in sport is everything. An absence of time and how to fit all the different competitions into it, is something cricket has a real issue with, especially with the continued rise of T20 cricket.
"There is a power at the moment to T20 cricket that is almost supernatural," Nicholas said.
"It's more than just ticket sales. It's the amount of people that want to own franchises, the amount of countries that want to run tournaments, it's the amount of players that want to be in a market all around the world.
"In a free market, the most money wins — and that's just the end-game.
"The players can see that bubbling away and they want to be a part of it. So, it is an extraordinary power that T20 has, and I think scheduling 50-over cricket alongside it just continues the story of the death knell of the ODI game."
ODIs squeezed out by international growth of T20
Since the first T20I between Australia and New Zealand at Eden Park on February 17, 2005, there have been 2,278 men's T20Is.
There are clear reasons for this explosion in numbers.
Prior to 2019, T20I status was limited to the full member, Test-playing nations but, in 2018, the ICC announced it would grant T20I status to all of its 105 members from January 1, 2019.
So, while only 12 nations or territories have ever played an official Test match, 29 have played an officially recognised ODI and a whopping 103 have played a T20I, from locations as varied as Belgium to Botswana.
Of those, 77 have played this year: Uganda (22 matches), Malta and Rwanda (21 each) the most prolific.
In fact, of the 298 T20Is played so far in 2023, the 12 full members contributed just 58, the lowest percentage of any year since T20 cricket was first played.
While just 10 teams made the cut for this World Cup, rising to 14 in four years' time, the 2024 men's T20 World Cup will have 20 teams take part.
It will also take place in a brand new cricketing frontier, the United States as co-host with the West Indies.
So what will the ODI scene look like in four years' time, by which time there will have been another two T20 World Cups having taken place?
Cowan believes, much in the same way as when Ben Stokes retired from the format in 2022, only to reverse his decision and return to help England in India, players will hang up their ODI boots after this tournament.
"It feels as though world cricket is in a place that there could be mass ODI retirements after this World Cup," he said.
"People will kind of signal that, in fact, the T20 status of these competitions around the world is more interesting to them and so there's this natural moment in time that happens to be this World Cup that there's a shift and maybe the importance of the ODI World Cup diminishes after this particular one."
The ICC, for now at least, is standing by its flagship tournament.
"The fact that we're seeing some highly competitive domestic T20 leagues around the world provides more choice for fans, more choice for players in terms of taking part, which is only going to improve the product particularly around our white-ball tournaments, the ICC World Cups," Wasim Khan, the ICC's general manager of cricket said in May.
"Obviously, the way the schedule is structured now and the emergence of these leagues, there has to be a way for us to co-exist.
"Nothing is going to be removed so we are going to have to co-exist moving forward."
Coexistence may be the desire, but when there's only so much time in the year, something will have to give and, sadly, ODI cricket seems primed to be the format that is elbowed out.
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