In my previous column I said that it would be a breeze for Ireland to qualify for the final qualifying World T20 Cup in India next year.

I can claim to be right about qualifying but the velocity of the wind involved is more akin to that associated with what Alex Ferguson described as squeaky bum time. I had reserved comment on Ireland’s performance until I saw their matches in Malahide as circumstances prevented me from going up to Belfast.

Ireland have been slow starters in tournaments often losing warm up matches and struggling in the early games of the competition proper. However I have never seen them so tentative for so long in any tournament. Last Friday against Hong Kong they fell five runs short of chasing down a modest target of 130 with John Mooney stranded on 18 not out off just 8 balls.

The successful T20 sides have their best strikers at the top of the order to maximize their impact in the shortest form of the game so why Mooney was batting at eight defied belief.

Post- match William Porterfield took responsibility for the defeat by saying that his own rate of scoring was a major factor in the defeat (he scored just 28 from 40 balls) and acknowledged that Mooney could have batted higher. In fairness to Porterfield he never shies away on the occasions when his side are below par.

It has been suggested that the Ireland batters have struggled to adapt to home conditions as the majority of them play their cricket in the faster wickets in England. That excuse might hold up for the first couple of games but these players have adjusted to conditions rapidly all over the world and they will never get lower or slower wickets than the one on which they beat the West Indies in February 2014.

In my view one of the main reasons is the opening partnership which is a key to winning T20 matches. I was at the previous qualifying tournament in Abu Dhabi in November 2013 and the opening combination throughout the eight games that Ireland played was William Porterfield and Paul Stirling. Yes the conditions were different but not dramatically so in terms of the condition of the wickets.

Ireland won every match, albeit with scares against Canada and UAE, and they batted first on every occasion. They comfortably had the highest run aggregate of all sixteen participating teams scoring 1414 runs at a run rate of 8.83 per over. Significantly the opening partnership accounted for 426 (30%) of these at the astonishing rate of 9.26 runs per over. Four of the eight innings produced opening partnerships of at least 68 and only twice were they below thirty.

This time the decision was made to change the partnership with Porterfield dropping down to three. Long standing partnerships work because both players understand each other’s game and can almost operate on auto pilot. A new partnership takes time to acquire the confidence and trust that is such a vital component of the toughest job in batting. The new combinations at the top had a combined aggregate of 27 runs off 47 balls in five innings which is a rate of 3.45 runs per over. It was only when Porterfield returned to the top of the order to partner Stirling against Jersey did things return to normal and their 44 run partnership of just 27 balls give the innings a winning momentum as the scoring rate returned to 2013 levels.

The bowling has been fine and should have been responsible for ensuring every game was won. Mooney may have conceded 3 sixes in the penultimate over against PNG but that can happen to any bowler in T20 and the problem wasn’t Mooney’s but rather the failure of the batters to muster more than 123 runs in their 20 overs.
In tomorrow’s semi-final Ireland will face the Dutch who will have happy memories of their last encounter in Bangladesh. The wicket will not be as good to bat on as was the surface in Sylhet so it is unlikely we will see a similar glut of runs.

As we have seen already in this tournament any team is capable of beating another so past performances are no guarantee of future success (this sounds like an ad for an investment opportunity). Ireland got a huge fright last week and as Porterfield said the team didn’t deserve to win the group but they did and I expect that they will make the most of their reprieve and go on and win the trophy for the third successive time.

No-one who is a supporter of Associate cricket can have failed to have welcomed the decision by Sky Sports to televise live twenty of the games in the qualifier, fourteen of which are in Malahide. The price to pay for this is that it comes with a regular commentary team whose combined knowledge of Associate cricket could fit comfortably into a tweet. In fairness as the tournament has progressed, their knowledge has expanded as they have actually seen most of the teams in action. However there is no excuse for not doing the most basic of research before they started their very lucrative sinecures.

When Pommie Mbangwa is the lead commentator you know that this is not even the C team. It is remarkable how many world tournaments he covers given his propensity to bring blandness to a new lower level. He may well earn his spot thanks to his unbounded enthusiasm which includes laughing disturbingly loudly at his fellow commentators inane jokes.

He is always striving to be one of the lads but you never get the sense that he quite makes it. It is particularly galling to listen to a Zimbabwean commentator wax lyrical about the standard of teams that are not Full Members. But Pommie is very positive about the Malahide ground and the surrounding area which does look very well from the high cameras.

Cricket has specialists in various aspects of the game but Sky (although it is Star Sports) has brought specialisation to commentary with what appears to be a specialist fielding commentator in Jonty Rhodes. A major part of his stint revolves around the discussion of the fielding abilities and strategies of the various teams without ever really getting to grips with the match itself. However this may be because he doesn’t want to take too much attention from his family holiday judging by the time spent in the nets with his two sons yesterday rather than watching the important game that he was supposed to be commenting on.

Dominic Cork does not pale in comparison to Pommie in enthusiasm and at least brings some relatively recent playing knowledge to the proceedings. Listening to him you would be tempted to wonder if part of his payment is based on the number of times he mentions India. In one twenty minute period yesterday he mentioned the name at least a dozen times. Perhaps he is trying to get his name on the BCCI’s approved list. He does however seems to appreciate that the standard of cricket is higher than he expected and he is also doing a great PR job for Malahide.

The two most impressive commentators have been Mark Butcher in Scotland and his replacement in Ireland, Matt Prior. The latter has demonstrated an empathy with the players in the tournament and had a genuine understanding of the devastation of the Namibian players yesterday when they lost to Oman and also when PNG failed to qualify. He, more readily than the others, grasped how much this tournament meant to all the teams and that the gap between Associates, other than Ireland, and Full Members was a lot closer that he would have imagined a couple of weeks ago.

I have not included Kyle McCallan in the regular group of commentators although he appears to be the go to guy when Ireland are involved in a tournament. He has brought Associate reality to the proceedings and has not as yet gone native. But unless I am mistaken he, in conjunction with the rest of the commentators, while building up the prize of getting to India has shied away from identifying that prize as just a further qualifying tournament. The big boys in India, as Dominic Cork described Oman’s future opponents yesterday, will actually be Bangladesh or Zimbabwe plus two other teams from this tournament.

This set of commentators clearly doesn’t want to incur the ire of ICC by letting their viewers know the reality.
They are in sharp contrast to William Porterfield who when I interviewed him after the Jersey match last Sunday said “ICC don’t seem to care what happens with Associates. They try to sugar coat this competition as a qualifier for a sixteen team World Cup in India whereas in reality it is only to get to another qualifier”

What are the chances of ICC listening to the most successful captain in Associate history rather than a team of hand- picked commentators? No need to bother with answers on a post card.

I will leave Dave Richardson and other matters relating to the ICC until my post tournament review but it would be remiss of me not to pass comment on the non- televised coverage of the event.

As I write a column for this website I clearly have a bias but notwithstanding that there is clear evidence that ICC care more about money than quality. This website has produced live ball by ball online commentary of matches for the best part of twenty years and has kept the followers of European Associate cricket up to date with their teams’ progress.

One of the criteria instigated by ICC to gain Full Member status is appropriate levels of media coverage. Yet this website (and indeed Cricinfo) who have been providing this excellent service has been prohibited from continuing the service from inside the ground therefor preventing live coverage.

It transpired that when the matches were televised they could not realistically prevent the games being covered remotely but it was the non-televised matched that suffered. Cricket lovers now log on to this website in their millions yet ICC would prefer that they get their live coverage by an automated service from OPTA. An untrained monkey hitting random keys would be more informative.

ICC, it would seem would prefer to suppress coverage that actually enhances the development of world cricket, in exchange for even more money that ends up in an organisation controlled by a man whose son in law's IPL team has been suspended for two years for what is effectively corruption.

Despite the obstacles CricketEurope continued to provide an excellent coverage throughout the tournament and will still be providing a first class service long after the ICC megalomaniacs have returned to obscurity.

Well done to John Elder and his merry band.