Ricky Ponting on cricket at the Olympics &#8211; &#8218;Opens up completely different audiences to our game&#8216;

Ricky Ponting on cricket at the Olympics – ‚Opens up completely different audiences to our game‘

August 11, 2024

in Cricket

Reading Time: 2 mins read

Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting feels that cricket’s return to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 4 years‘ time [LA28] will probably be helpful to the sport.

„It may possibly solely be a constructive factor for our sport. I’ve sat on numerous committees during the last 15 or 20 years, and it is all the time been on the highest of virtually each agenda – how can we get the sport again into the Olympics? And eventually, it is there,“ Ponting stated on The ICC Overview. „It is solely 4 years away. I believe it additionally offers cricket an opportunity to interrupt into the grassroots stage within the US.“

Cricket is returning to the Video games after 128 years, with the one time it featured beforehand being in 1900, with two groups – Nice Britain and France – collaborating, and the previous profitable gold.

„The factor in regards to the Olympic Video games, it isn’t [about] the host nation. It is in regards to the viewers that it opens up,“ Ponting stated. „The Olympic Video games being considered by so many individuals all around the globe, it simply opens up fully totally different audiences to our sport that is seemingly rising every day anyway. It may possibly solely be an actual constructive factor for the sport.“

Ponting stated infrastructure and qualification pathways would nonetheless have to be appropriately found out however, with its inclusion, the sport is shifting in the proper route general. „Services and infrastructure and people issues are going to be key, and what number of [participating] groups they really resolve on. I believe it is solely six or seven groups that they are speaking about, so qualification goes to be at a premium – the way you truly qualify to get into the Olympic Video games.

„So all these are issues to consider, [but] I am actually enthusiastic about the place the sport’s headed and the expansion of various markets that we’re seeing emerge.“

Cricket at LA28 will probably be performed within the T20 format, with each males’s and ladies’s groups set to function.

The sport had been within the highlight within the USA earlier this yr too, when the nation co-hosted the boys’s T20 World Cup with the West Indies.

Edited PTI copy.

Source link