Toronto: where worlds collide

Every day, as the sun rises over Lake Ontario and sweeps across the adjoining collection of beaches and bays, it would be possible to imagine a million potentialities for this city. The vast urban sprawl that it has become in the wave of the amalgamation of six far smaller cities only three years ago, Toronto offers a mixture of activity that caters for almost every conceivable taste.

Or so any self-respecting tourist brochure - or almost any observation of everyday life here for that matter - will tell you.

North America's fourth biggest city hardly shapes as an archetypal venue for international cricket. Amid the hustle of daily events, there are certainly few obvious clues that it is about to play host to cricket's biggest gathering of national teams.

At a local level, summer sporting passions here are fuelled in person, in print and on the airwaves by the fortunes of baseball's Toronto Blue Jays. As for a tangible fervour for far-reaching international competition, it is the flags that exhort the city's residents to "Expect the World" in the lead-up to the decision next month on its bid to host the 2008 Olympics which dominate.

Happily, the lack of exposure for them within the area bounded by Toronto's frequently jammed highways and leafy, tree-lined avenues doesn't particularly bother most of the players or teams that have assembled for the 2001 ICC Trophy tournament. Moreover, they have learnt to live with an absence of international notoriety, hype and hysteria for most of their careers.

It is, in fact, hard to imagine too many more amenable settings for the hopes, aspirations and dreams of twenty-three developing cricketing nations to collide.

In the four years that have passed since the Trophy's last incarnation - in Kuala Lumpur - cricket has been afflicted by arguably its deepest-ever scandal. The scourge of match fixing and corruption has scarred its soul, ravaged its reputation, and played havoc with its credibility. At various times, those responsible for charting the sport's very future have seemed under siege.

Yet there can be probably be few greater demonstrations of the game's enduring appeal than in the way in which nations from backgrounds as diverse as Uganda and the United States or centres as distant as Fiji and France continue to come together for this event.

Through the twenty-two years of its history, no other cricket tournament in the world has brought together so many nations nor so effectively melded drama, tension and exhilaration with the basic grass-roots ideal of participation. It remains a remarkable celebration of the game and its prospects.

On the battlefront itself, a close and compelling contest for glory can be anticipated. Scotland, with the legacy of one World Cup campaign already behind it, will enter the fray as the favourite. Yet no mortgage on another Cup berth - a prize which lies in wait for each of the three best sides in this event - can be automatically assumed. Strong competition is expected to come from the likes of Ireland - the team which it narrowly nosed out in the race for third-placed honours four years ago - as well as from the Netherlands and host nation Canada.

The development of complex seeding and points systems has seen to it that many of the lower-ranked sides will find the goal of a World Cup spot as elusive as ever before. Their visions of emulating nations like Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Kenya (for each of whom success at this level has paved the way for eventual admission to fully-fledged Test and/or One-Day International status) will, accordingly, almost certainly have to be put on hold in the short term.

For Italy, such ambitions have already been over-ridden by an International Cricket Council ruling that four of its leading players were ineligible to compete. The respective passages of Nepal, West Africa and the United Arab Emirates were far from smooth either; visa problems promoting a flurry of late diplomatic activity.

Nonetheless, everything is now set in place for a spectacular and successful event. The rankings have been formulated. The schedule has been unveiled. Twenty-two days in the midst of an increasingly warm Toronto summer have been set aside. An infrastructure has been made to measure and ten grounds, replete with turf pitches which have been crafted in often unsympathetic conditions, have been beautifully prepared.

As four years of earnest preparations approach their climax, it is over to the players.