Don't rush it

The dust had barely settled on Kenya's win over Bangladesh before the almost inevitable calls came for them to be awarded Test status.

Maurice Odumbe, Man of the Match against Bangladesh, said that the Kenyans "don't mind being with the big boys". He went on: "Kenya have been lobbying very hard for Test status. I don't know how far along it has gone but I definitely believe we belong there."

If the sole criteria was the relative merits of Kenya and Bangladesh then their elevation to full status would be a formality. Bangladesh's performances have gone from mediocre to downright embarrassing in the last few months, with repeated drubbings at Test level being compounded by a failure to beat either Kenya or Canada at the World Cup. They are currently so feeble that they would probably struggle against Holland and Namibia. Kenya, meanwhile, have a place in the Super Sixes.

But things are not that straightforward. Bangladesh's elevation to Test status came about largely as a result of non-field factors. Firstly, Bangladesh was seen, not unreasonably, as a vast, untapped market for the International Cricket Council (ICC) to exploit. Secondly, at the 1999 World Cup they beat Pakistan. At the time it was seen as their coming of age, but the result has since been tarnished by persistent allegations that it was the target of match-fixing. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Jagmohan Dalmiya, at the time president of the ICC, saw their becoming a full member as a way of strengthening the Asian bloc on the ICC.

For a few months all went well, but it soon became clear that Bangladesh simply weren't up to it. The relatively new ICC Test Championship, which necessitated them playing two-Test series against the other countries, left all their weaknesses cruelly exposed and the cumulative effect of incessant hammerings culminated in their inept performances in South Africa. Quite simply, they are shell-shocked.

The recent criticism heaped on the ICC for fast-tracking Bangladesh will have made it sensitive to making the same mistake again, and that will count against Kenya. Furthermore, while Bangladesh has a massive population which is fanatical about the game, Kenya, outside the relatively small Asian and European community, has until very recently remained oblivious to the game. The number of Africans taking up cricket is growing, but it is a slow change.

Kenya also has no first-class structure, something which has seriously undermined Bangladesh's progress. While Bangladesh now do play a few first-class games, their inexperience has left them all at sea in Test cricket. Kenya would suffer a similar fate.

The mistake the ICC made with Bangladesh was to confuse one-day success with the ability to play Tests. Saying that, apart from their win over Pakistan, Bangladesh have only beaten Scotland (also in 1999) and Kenya (in 1997-98) in 67 ODIs. Since 1999 they have lost 30 ODIs on the trot, a world record beating their own pre-1999 sequence. Their abject performances in Test cricket - not the results, but more the manner of their defeats - have highlighted that the gulf between the two forms of the game is too great to be bridged overnight.

Kenya need to play more threeand four-day games against first-class sides, get more experience of playing in other countries, and develop their own first-class structure before they should be seriously considered for Test status. The other new members to the elite, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe, were made to wait and to build a structure that would support their position at the top table. It might have been frustrating, but they benefited from not being rushed into something for which they weren't prepared.

To expose Kenya to the likes of Australia and South Africa on the strength of a win over Sri Lanka and Bangladesh would be to repeat the mistakes of the past, and risk snuffing out the considerable progress that they have made.