The analysts are saying that India may face a stronger and third wave of COVID. Who knows whether it will happen or not. Still four months left for the T20 world cup but ICC should take the decision as early as possible. Cause there is a matter of arrangement which will take time. If the situation doesn't get better in India then UAE and other middle East county will get the chance to host the world cup. In my opinion, ICC should give permission to Oman and other middle East countries for hosting world cup this time. Cricket will gain more popularity in middle East countries if a world cup happens at their places.
It is the most logical thing to do. The daily death toll in India has stabilized between 3,000 and 4,000. Similarly, the number of cases also stand at 150,000-250,000 range. These are huge numbers. Before the second wave, the average number of daily cases stood at less than 10,000 and the number of deaths were ~100 per day. Current numbers represent a 30x spike and it is going to take many months for the situation to go back to normal.
And regarding popularizing cricket, I don't even know if it is possible. During the two decades during the 2000-2020 period, the ICC took a very strong line of discouraging cricket in the associate nations. The reduced the participation of associate countries in the global tournaments, scrapped the inter-continental cup and many of the other global tournaments and reduced funding to almost zero. However, the biggest blow was when they changed the eligibility criteria, which allowed foreigners without any connection to a particular country to represent that country in cricket. That just killed the local talent. 20 years ago, many of the European and American teams were having cricket teams predominantly comprised of locals. Now these teams are 100% made of expats from India or Pakistan.
