Nothing to see here then so, move along. The Ireland men’s team’s last ditch qualification for the T20 World Cup took the heat off Cricket Ireland this week, but not for long.

On Wednesday the Times of India reported that the world’s No1 side would be coming to play a single T20 against Ireland in June. With it costing up to €500,000 to upgrade Malahide to a temporary stadium CI needs two games to cover its costs. With the organisation already budgeting for a €700,000 loss this year it will need to make money from its marquee fixture.

So it will consider playing the game in England, where there is a better chance of good weather and selling out an existing ground, but it would be a blow to local supporters and a missed opportunity to promote the game here.

Speaking of missed opportunities, the Portas Review emerged last week and rarely has 72 pages had so little to inspire. CI declined to publish it which may be a favour to anyone who might have read it. As a flavour, the summary begins “Board must ensure there is a clear strategy and direction of travel for the programme. Vision and strategy must be cascaded across all stakeholders, internal and external, and appropriate goals and budgets set.”

Commissioned in the wake of failure at the last T20 World Cup, it was quickly followed by the resignation of coach Graham Ford. The review was delivered to CI before Christmas, but then spent two months with the High Performance Department before it was sent to the board.

The HPD escapes serious direct criticism in the document given to the board. Written by Portas, UAE-based consultants with roots in Bristol, assisted by former Ireland coach Adi Birrell.

It’s not clear how much input Birrell had, but he appeared online at last week’s board meeting and made an impassioned 40-minute contribution which shocked many of those present. He was critical of Cricket Ireland and said it had missed several opportunities to advance the game.

Birrell left Ireland after the 2007 World Cup and was stunned at how little improvement had been made in training and playing facilities since. He said Ireland was falling behind all the countries it ranks alongside such as Zimbabwe and Afghanistan but also the facilities of UAE, Netherlands and Oman.

Now Hampshire coach, he criticised the decision to keep players at home, pointing to the large number of Dutch and Scots players at English counties which acts as their High Performance system. Birrell also queried why players outside the active squad were sitting at home all winter, suggesting they could have been placed in professional clubs in South Africa or Zimbabwe.

He also noted that a 2019 external review had signed off with 20 action points – but three years on he was unclear how many of them had been addressed. He suggested CI hires Graham Ford to monitor the delivery of the 18 action points Portas had identified.

Those 18 points are mostly self-evident truths buried in corporate speak, but it gets into specifics such as restructuring the job of Performance Director Richard Holdsworth to allow him to focus on high performance issues and strategy, opening the way to hire a Director of Cricket. Creating such a role might allow CI to retain the experience of the likes of William Porterfield or recruit one of the former players with international experience such as Trent Johnston, John Mooney or Jeremy Bray.

Portas also suggests more training camps and integrating provincial coaches into the national set-up. On facilities it stresses that a plan be developed to ensure the HPC centre is fit for purpose, which seems like putting the cart before the horse.

The authors also sought players’ views on facilities, which are less candid than those on a recent survey of local grounds which upset almost all the venues. But one player explained “When the pitches at home are not of a sufficient standard, our whole game suffers. Bowlers can bowl the wrong lengths and be rewarded with wickets, batters need to bat with caution and hope. You go to a competition abroad it is flipped and you need to adapt to the opposite which is extremely demanding.”

Money is tight – though the €250,000 for qualifying will help – so new facilities cannot be achieved at the click of the fingers but Portas proposes that CI concentrates its resources on one ground in each region. And while weather is a major bugbear Birrell suggested sending groundskeepers to learn from Durham and Leeds where hard, true pitches are produced in similar climates.

The organisation’s push to drive itself into full membership left behind huge parts of the game, especially the training and playing facilities needed to develop the teams – the sight of an Ireland team flying to a school in England to practice on far superior grounds than here was humiliating for an organisation charged with providing such things for Irish youngsters. Meanwhile, opportunities for players are dwindling with the first-class championship shelved until 2024 at least. Bizarrely, a number of contributors wondered if they would even be discussing these problems had Ireland not lost to Namibia.

Covid was a handy excuse, but not having to provide major fixture infrastructure these past two years saved CI money, as well as receiving €2.1million in state pandemic funding last year. Despite annual ICC funding around €2.5million, the organisation is still strapped and has budgeted for a multi-million euro deficit in 2023, its centenary year. A new ICC round of handouts that year could get it out of a hole but otherwise, like Mr Micawber, Cricket Ireland is reduced to hoping that something will turn up.