It’s October 12th. As I sit on a gorgeous Sunday morning with my tea - green tea with lemon and honey being an old broadcaster’s trick after four games in four days - Australia is firmly in control of their chase against India in the Women’s Cricket World Cup, which is staggering considering India set a target of 331 at Visakhapatnam for the Aussies to chase. There is plenty of room for twists and turns, though, just like there was when India had South Africa on the ropes only to be taken down by a spectacular effort from Nadine de Klerk just a few days prior. In fact, as I finish this paragraph, Ellyse Perry turned her left leg wrong playing a shot through the covers and had to head back to the pavilion with an injury.
One Day International cricket presents much of the best of the game: 50 overs per team allows time for strategy and more intricate battles between bat and ball while still providing room for the more explosive elements that were brought to the fore when the ECB introduced T20 cricket 20 years ago. Multiple dips, dives, twists, and turns in the story of a game can play out over 600 deliveries, and no single moment in a game is decisive: teams have to be consistent and put in a full body of work. Women’s tests are extremely rare - there have been 32 in the last 20 years, and they have only been played by England, India, Australia, South Africa, and the Netherlands (yes, they played one in 2007!), so ODI is unquestionably the premier format of women’s cricket.
But on the men’s side of the game, it’s hard to shake the feeling ODIs are on their way out.
ODI cricket was invented by happy accident when England and Australia were hellbent on playing something in 1971 amid a weather-affected test. Kerry Packer laid the foundation for much of what it is now with World Series Cricket later in the decade that cranked up the TV production value around the sport and paid players handsomely (for the time) for their work. ODI was, in its time, what T20 has been over the last 15 years or so, a cutting-edge product altering the landscape and pushing the envelope on what cricket is and can be… and who it’s for. ODI cricket was the first chance Sri Lanka had to compete on an international stage in the 1975 World Cup; Canada came on the scene in 1979, then Zimbabwe in 1983, and Bangladesh in the 1986 Asia Cup. The United States played 53 international matches between 1979 and 2005, and all but two of them were 50-over format; our first ODI was against New Zealand in the 2004 ICC Champions Trophy (we got thrashed, then got thrashed again by Australia), and the men’s national team earned its current run of ODI status in 2019 after an ICC Americas-organized team finished second in Division Three of the mercifully defunct World Cricket League.
It did a lot of what T20 is doing now... but, crucially and tautologically, T20 is doing that now. The shortest format of the game is what has proliferated it to Italy, Brazil, Malaysia, Japan, and points far beyond. It’s what has given the game a true foothold in the United States, with crowds in the thousands watching franchise and World Cup matches while maybe a dozen people meander into the stands to watch the US play two riveting/nerve-wracking games against Oman at Lauderhill. The Asia Cup, one of the most prestigious tournaments on Earth, switched from ODIs to T20s for women in 2012 and for men in 2016. India is feeding that beast with the IPL and its coterie of eccentric billionaires investing in leagues around the world and finding plenty of willing partners who see the potential of a format that aligns with other popular sports around the world. It has put the game in front of millions of fresh eyeballs and represents the overwhelming majority of the sport’s growth in the last 20 years. That’s doubly true since the ICC proliferated T20I status to all members, making it the most accessible format for new countries looking to make a mark on the global cricket stage.
All of that has allowed T20 to be a disruptive force in the landscape, with a heavy T20I calendar and franchises seeking a slice of established and emerging markets creating fixture congestion. Players have to make a choice on what to skip, and ODIs are going on the chopping block early for a lot of them. Marcus Stoinis and Heinrich Klaasen became the latest to walk away from 50 over cricket earlier this year, with Klaasen very pointedly saying bilateral tours should not include ODIs at all, affording more time for tests as the game’s highest level and T20s as the athletic crowd pleasers that ODIs used to be. He’s not the first one to say it, though: former Marylebone Cricket Club president Mark Nicholas said in 2023 that ODIs should be played exclusively at the World Cup, which is, I must stress, a terrible idea for the future of the Cricket World Cup, a $720 million Goliath of a sports property.
It’s also a slap in the face to Associate Members, who play their best and most compelling cricket in ODIs. One need only look at the Scotland tri-series with the Netherlands and Nepal in June for how electric the format can be, with Karan KC’s 65* leading Nepal to a one-wicket win with one ball to spare. It was so exhilarating that Nepali fans stormed the field after the win! The two sides played another great game six days later with Scotland hanging on to win by two runs, and the Netherlands’ Max O’Dowd traded haymakers with George Munsey in an epic slugfest with the Dutch winning by four wickets with four balls left. The action was constant and compelling. It’s also something Associate Members can earn and hold without wading into the byzantine politics of the Full Member crab bucket. It guarantees them more cricket and access to the resources to make that additional cricket happen and ostensibly reflects investment and commitment to the sport in those countries.
ODIs absolutely matter to the United States, and not just because of the longer format itself. The existing World Cup structure sees high-level Associate Members travel to each other, and, hey, we gotta find games across multiple formats somehow. Associates with ODI status have a much easier time booking bilateral T20s because they already have to play each other, so bolting a few T20Is onto a tri-series is cost-effective. Sometimes those are the only bilateral matches a board can get in a given season, and that makes them essential to preparing players for the elaborate T20 World Cup qualification process or the T20 World Cup itself. (Which, by the way, we are not prepared for. Like, at all.)
But to play devil’s advocate for Klaasen in particular, there are 39 ODIs between FMs in the 2025-26 season which began in September and ends in March, all played in series of three. 12 of those accompany at least one Test match, and all but one - Sri Lanka’s tour of Pakistan that starts on November 11 - is accompanied by T20Is. Removing the ODIs from those tours would open up at least five days on the calendar (three matches and two off days), creating room for extra tests between Pakistan and South Africa, New Zealand and the West Indies, India and South Africa, and Bangladesh and Pakistan. All of those are pretty compelling matchups that would get a lot of love on TV and at the gate! Ireland and Bangladesh have even done this for the former’s tour of the latter in November: Ireland asked to reduce a 2-3-3 series to 1-3-3, but they eventually scrapped all three ODIs and kept the second test instead. That’s a telling example of where the priorities are for boards when push comes to shove. There appears to be little interest in rehabilitating the one-day format at the top of the ladder: attempts at reviving the ODI Super League have fallen on deaf ears, most recently in Singapore at the AGM back in July, so it’s back to the drawing board.
What’s clear at this point is that the center cannot hold. T20s have the cash, test cricket has the prestige, and ODIs have neither. The format has failed as a pathway to the elite tier of global cricket because of politics and has seen its commercial appeal eroded by T20. Full Member players don’t seem to care much for it, and boards are willing to go without it when pressed. A world without ODI requires significant structural change and economic risk; a world where ODI thrives as a format requires proactive management and a growth strategy to make the format mean more to everyone in cricket’s orbit. In the grand scheme, either can work out, but the iceberg is dead ahead and the sport’s power brokers have to decide if we’re turning left or right to avoid it well before the curtain falls at Wanderers Stadium in 2027.
And as I finish this article (or at least the first draft), the plot of Australia’s chase has shifted again: Perry has returned from injury and just smashed the match-winning six down the ground to give Australia a three-wicket win with an over to spare - the highest successful chase in women’s ODI history, and a feat that would have proved impossible in T20s since the game would have been over by the time Perry could get back out there (nevermind the fact that she got hurt in the 24th over).
Seems like there’s always one more twist around the corner for ODIs. I wonder what the next one will be?