Ponting says 50-over cricket is the obvious thing to lose, and that is only true at the top of the game

Ricky Ponting played 375 one-day internationals, more than anyone has. He scored 13,704 runs in them, which puts him third behind Sachin Tendulkar and Kumar Sangakkara, and he won the World Cup three times, the last two of them as captain. So when he says the 50-over game is going to get squeezed, the quote is worth reading in full rather than in headline form.

What he actually said

“As the months go by and the years go by and more and more T20 cricket is being played and more franchises and franchise tournaments are starting around the world, it’s more and more likely that 50-over cricket is probably going to be played less,” Ponting said this week. “It’s inevitable, which I’m not a huge fan of, to be honest.”

Then the part that does the work:

“I love playing that format of the game, but something’s got to give somewhere. Test cricket is still going to remain strong as long as India, Australia, England and probably South Africa want Test cricket to remain strong. It will. So something’s got to give. And the obvious one is 50-over cricket.”

On the calendar, he is right

There is not much to argue with in the mechanics. Test cricket is protected by the four boards rich enough to protect it, and Ponting names them without flinching. T20 franchise cricket is where the growth and the money are. Something has to give way, and the ODI is the format with no natural defender. No franchise league is built on it. No board’s balance sheet depends on a bilateral 50-over series played in the gap between the formats that sell.

That is not a prediction so much as a description of what is already happening.

Where he said it is part of the point

Ponting made the comments on Tuesday, at a press conference in Melbourne, announcing that he has bought into the Australia Champions franchise in the World Championship of Legends alongside Puneet Singh, with David Warner captaining the side. Season three of that competition is a T20 tournament and it runs in the UAE from 3 to 18 October.

I do not read that as hypocrisy. I read it as him being an unusually well-placed witness. The most prolific one-day batter of his generation is telling you the format is being crowded out, and the reason he is at a microphone to say it is that he has just bought a T20 team. That is the entire trend compressed into one afternoon in Melbourne.

It gets sharper. Afghanistan confirmed their own season this week, and it includes an ODI tri-series with Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, in the UAE, from 17 to 23 October. So for a couple of days in the middle of that month the same country will stage a legends T20 tournament and a three-nation 50-over series involving three Full Members, and I would not put money on the tri-series drawing the bigger crowd.

The part the argument leaves out

This is where I stop agreeing with him, and it is not a dispute about the facts.

Ponting’s protected four are India, Australia, England and South Africa. Underneath them sit eight teams in the ICC’s Cricket World Cup League 2: Nepal, Namibia, the Netherlands, the UAE, Canada, Scotland, Oman and the United States. That competition is played entirely in ODIs, in tri-series, and it is the road to the 2027 World Cup. Below it is the Challenge League, which is the third tier of international 50-over cricket.

For those countries the ODI is not one option among three. It is the format. It is how they qualify, how they are ranked, how their players get seen and how their boards justify their funding. Take 50-over cricket out of the calendar and you have not trimmed a format, you have removed the only structured international pathway most of the cricket world has.

The 2027 World Cup makes the case better than I can. Fourteen teams, 4 October to 21 November, spread across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia. Namibia are co-hosting a tournament they still have to qualify for, which tells you exactly how much 50-over cricket they will be playing to get there.

What I think happens next

My guess, and it is a guess. The ODI does not die. It stops being something India, Australia and England bother to play against each other outside a World Cup year, and bilateral 50-over cricket between the biggest boards thins to almost nothing. Meanwhile the format keeps ticking along in Sharjah and Bulawayo and Kirtipur, because for the sides playing there it is the only ladder in the building.

That would be a strange outcome. A format the biggest countries stop taking seriously, kept alive by the countries with the least money in the game, and then wheeled back out every four years for a World Cup those same big countries very much want to win. Ponting is right that something has to give. I am less sure that what gives will be the format itself, rather than the willingness of four rich boards to keep turning up for it.

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