New Zealand with a colibration of Australia bid with Australia to host the World Cup in 2011

New Zealand Cricket (NZC) will bid with Australia to host the World Cup in 2011 - the same year New Zealand is vying to stage the Rugby World Cup.

The New Zealand and Australian cricket bodies are in the early stages of forming a shared bid to host the event.

NZC chief executive Martin Snedden said yesterday that any formal proposal was still a long way off, but initial talks had been held between the boards.

“We will express our interest but do not know what the bidding process will be yet,” he said.

“It’s too soon to be optimistic, but we are realistic. We have held the event here before and proved we could run it well and capably.”

The two countries last staged the World Cup in early 1992, and under the rotation structure employed since the 1980s by the International Cricket Council (ICC), it is time for Australasia to host the event again after the West Indies complete the cycle in 2007.

Snedden said that did not guarantee the event would return to the southern hemisphere then.

He said most revenue from the event came from Asia, where there were four of the 10 test-playing nations - India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Television rights commanded huge sums from Indian organisations.

“And because of the number of countries in the Asian region, it will come around more frequently there,” Snedden said.

Snedden said he did not expect anything to be decided until the annual meeting of the ICC in about a year.

Any bid by New Zealand and Australia would not be associated with the New Zealand Rugby Union’s World Cup bid for 2011, which will be decided in November.

If both organisations were successful, Snedden expected the cricket to be staged during February and March of that year, while he understood rugby was looking at September and October.

Snedden said he expected the tournament would be run along similar lines to 1992, with a shared split of the preliminary matches. In 1992, Melbourne hosted the final.