To Canada and Scotland, who face off in a World Cup League 2 game on Friday, the honour of playing cricket's 5000th men's ODI. Had rain not washed out games in Dundee and Bready this week, the opener of the bilateral series between Ireland and Afghanistan would have been the landmark. Instead, starting 15 minutes before the Canada-Scotland fixture on Friday, the second ODI between those two has to be content with being the 4999th.
On the face of it, these games in Dundee and Bready, between two established Associates and the two newest Full Members - themselves shiny examples of upward Associate member mobility - all ostensibly on a pathway that leads to cricket's pinnacle event might be interpreted as a triumph for the game's spread. Between them the two games involve an impressively vast geographical spread, from North America to Europe to West Asia.
In truth, for those outside the teams involved and their fan bases, the 5000th men's ODI strikes a distinctly underwhelming note. Canada and Scotland have played World Cups before and their chance to play in next year's World Cup is alive, but the route feels increasingly circuitous. Ireland, meanwhile, having not played an ODI in 15 months, are thrust immediately into the start of a longish, only slightly less circuitous road they hope leads to the World Cup proper.
For most, however, whatever context remains in these games is buried so deep it is all but unseen. Why are they playing ODIs still, you might ask? Why, in a calendar so bursting at the seams that ultimately these games register as little more than scorecards to record and the ensuing data to accrue? Games that are filler content really, between whatever will be deemed worthier of our already stretched and siloed attentions: a Test tour of England, Australia or Sri Lanka perhaps; the Hundred, the CPL, the end of the LPL.
So, the 5000th ODI becomes the latest part of a long, drawn-out final pant of a format, wheezing on cricket's never-ending treadmill, like all us dads, inexplicably getting flabbier instead of leaner the longer it stays on. Tests remain cricket's prestige and legacy format, T20s the vehicle for its growth, T10s the deviant child in need of urgent scrutiny, and the Hundred… well, the Hundred is not unlike Bez of the legendary Madchester band the Happy Mondays: all energy and vibes but with no actual musical function within the band.
The ODI? Fifty-five years and 5000 games old, and the most overlooked and unloved of cricket's five formats. Nobody even worries about the ODI dying like they do with Tests. Perhaps it is already dead. Because what is the last ODI you remember? The 2023 World Cup final>/a> possibly, if for no other reason than because it is the sport's showpiece? Maybe Glenn Maxwell's Undertaker schtick against Afghanistan from the same event, because of the bonkers comeback nature of the win? For many it might be the 2019 World Cup final, which also doubles as arguably the greatest ODI ever played.
Now ask yourself what is the last ODI you remember that did not take place in an ICC event? In the way that people remember the maximal thrills of Johannesburg, or Desert Storm, or the Karachi epic between Pakistan and India? When we compiled the Cricket Monthly's greatest ODIs list in 2023, as many as eight games from the top 20 were from outside ICC events; a newer list - should there ever even be one in the future - is unlikely to have as high a proportion.
Because that age, where an ODI could exist as a thing of its own without needing a big-picture justification, is long gone. The '90s and 2000s were its golden age. Long bilateral series, random tri-series in Singapore or Tangier, the quadrangulars of Sharjah, the annual tri-series in Australia - these were all, for a sizeable generation of cricket fans, a formative experience. And in the sense of their abundance, they were like the T20 franchise leagues of today, one barely over before the next one was upon us, but a game or two would always stick.
Some might tut-tut about the excesses of the format that allowed the ODI to be tarred with those first corruption scandals. It is worth directing them to the corruption that has plagued so many T20 and T10 leagues (not to mention the multiple instances of players not having been paid or paid inordinately late) and recognising that it is not a format problem but a governance one.
Still, times, tastes and trends change. Vinyl becomes cassettes becomes CDs becomes MP3s becomes streaming platforms, so ODIs cannot be expected to hold the same place they did back then.
And yet, as unfashionable as it might be to take this position, it does not mean ODIs themselves should be done with (CDs, as ODIs are in the above analogy, have made a comeback this year). In fact, one of the consequences of the shortening of the game has been that a 50-over contest stands out in sharper contrast. The rapid and ongoing evolution of T20 means that it has become a different sport altogether. It works off a different ethos and speaks from a different glossary, requiring a separate set of fundamentals, and acceptance of an altered balance between its two sets of principal actors and their two principal instruments.
In the process T20s have better outlined the contours of what an ODI is, recognisable still as a game of cricket where bat and ball can challenge each other and maintain competitive tension. When that balance is disturbed is when ODIs invariably become least satisfying, as between the 2015 and 2019 World Cups, when they were forced to become more like a stretched-out T20 and less like a Test compressed. That the era concluded with the format's GOAT game, though - 241 vs 241 on a niggly, nuggety surface - served both as irony and reminder. Cricket is at its best when it allows lulls to coexist with agitations, when momentum can creep up on a side as well as slap it right in the face, when tension builds so surreptitiously, it might be missed right until the point it bursts through.
Any problem with ODIs is not, per se, a problem with the ODI format (although the incessant fiddling with its playing conditions might make you think otherwise). The bigger problem, at the level of Full Members, is with the lack of urgency or coherence about them, or even a tangible sense of jeopardy. With so much cricket of so many kinds on the calendar, games have to hold some meaning to register. Instead, most ODI bilaterals feed into a stale old rankings system that only acquires relevance once a World Cup comes into view. It's worse for Associates, for whom whatever context exists, is arbitrary and expendable, as they have just discovered. One day they are on a three-year-long qualification path to the World Cup, and the next, that path has changed and become a lot more challenging.
In which light, one of the more intriguing what-ifs of the age will forever remain the ODI Super League, hastily discarded following the 2023 World Cup, after a solitary iteration. It's a shame especially because that league was not done in by some intrinsic flaw in the format or even the calendar as much as by the disruptions of a historic pandemic. The rationale underpinning a uniform, rolling multi-year league that leads to direct qualification for the game's pinnacle event was sound then and it is sound now.
That 13-team league worked best with a smaller World Cup (if too many teams qualified from one league, there would be no jeopardy). But if cricket continues to dither over the size of its World Cup as it has over the last decade, it could even work like UEFA's Nations League in football - a multi-year league that essentially replaces international friendlies and the winning of which is its own reward. Cricket has dithered about the Champions Trophy for years now too - why not ditch that and bring this in?
The World Test Championship has shown us that a compelling league - even if it is imperfect - can be forged out of the least league-friendly circumstances. There is no reason why, as long as there is intent among cricket's administrators to keep ODIs alive, a Super League can't thrive, given time and space in the calendar.
What shouldn't be an option is to leave ODIs as they are, 5000 games on, hanging in the ether, clogging up the calendar once every three years, nobody sure as to why they are here, only sure that they'll be forgotten the instant they are done.