The Twenty20 World Cup in Cricket gets underway in Sri Lanka this week and Ireland will have an opportunity to capture the attention of the sporting world as they have in the past.  They are in a tough group alongside Australia and the West Indies but it was victories against supposedly better nations in Pakistan and England that built the support that has enabled Cricket fully establish itself here and on a global stage.
The Australia game takes place on Wednesday with an 11 AM start time and a likely finish in prime time.  It will be televised on Sky Sports.  Australia have plummeted in the world rankings for this variant of the sport and now rest only once place above Ireland, making a victory at least possible if not yet likely.
There is great hope for Ireland in that two of its brightest stars these next few weeks are likely to be among the youngest at the tournament. Paul Stirling from Belfast and George Dockrell, a graduate of Trinity College, are both highly regarded in the sport and will add to the Irish team of stars from previous endeavours that includes Trent Johnson, Kevin and Niall O’Brien and William Porterfield.
Ed Joyce has returned to the Ireland fold and there is hope at least that Ireland can cause an upset and qualify for the Super 8 phase of the tournament as they have in the past.  To do so this time would most likely be at the expense of Australia but odds of as low as 7/1 about victory on Wednesday are a mark of how far Ireland have come in a sport that would once have been dismissed completely outside a very few small pockets of the country.
RSA, O’Neills, Volkswagen and Johnston Mooney and O’Brien are the main commercial partners of the sport in Ireland which has now grown to a point where the latest strategic plan for Cricket Ireland has an ambition of 50,000 players by 2015.
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