Next ICC World Cup
It hasn't been a great Cricket World Cup, has it? It can still be redeemed by a couple of good semi-finals and a great final, but it's fallen into all the usual traps of meaningless games, one-sided processions, hyperbole and, above all, dragging on and on.
Cricket pundits en masse have shown their rank hypocrisy by suddenly proclaiming the ludicrousness of the competition's reduction to 10 teams in 2019, when for years and years they've all been advocating just that and saying the presence of the associate minnows was a waste of time. Jonathan Agnew is the only one I've heard who has at least admitted that he's changed his mind, rather than just hoping people have no memory.
It is always to cricket's detriment that it is full of, at the same time, small-minded conservatism and knee-jerk reactions. Ad to that mix, over the last decade or so, gross cupidity and self-aggrandisement and it can all look rather ugly.
English cricket is, of course, its own unique mess right now. If only we could still put their ODI incompetence down to an insurmountable subconscious indifference to the shorter form, a stubborn but ultimately rewarding belief that test cricket is what really matters. Not applicable anymore, sadly. Not when you've shifted an Ashes Series just to prepare for an ultimately disastrous World Cup. Anyway, oh well, England are rubbish. So be it. Let's talk about something else.
How can cricket finally get its World Cup right? To me, it's pretty simple.
The "associates" brought a lot of the joy to this World Cup and also some of the best, most exciting matches. They all showed that they were capable of not embarrassing themselves (or considerably better in some cases) against test nations.
Yet there are undoubtedly too many matches, and the tournament goes on too long. There are 47 matches over 6 weeks. 8 from 14 teams go through to the quarters. I don't think you should have a format of more teams qualifying than not, however much hope that gives minnows like England ...
So, quite simply, increase to 16, have 4 groups of 4, 2 teams from each group qualify. More teams, fewer matches, 31 in fact, so you can polish the tournament off in less than a month, with barely a single wasted, inconsequential game.
Probably there'll be fewer mismatches, and there'll be good competition in each group, as the Seed 1 team will likely be tested by the Seed 2 team, the Seed 2 team might well be tested by the 3rd and maybe the 4th, the 3rd (this is the likes of Ireland and Zimbabwe) will have good games with at least the 2nd and 4th seeds, and the 4th seeds (Scotlands, maybe Kenya) will at least test the 3rd seed, and quite possibly the 2nd. The tournament won't have time to drift away, there'll be more chance of upsets, the lesser teams won't run out of gas from playing too many top teams, there'll be less inevitability. Simple really.
You can say a lot of bad things about the way football is run but it does open itself up to the whole world, there's no doubt about that. It's terrible that there is and has always been a strong strand in cricket that seems to want to keep it to 7 or 8 top teams. People forget it took over a decade for Sri Lanka to become a significant force. Let's keep giving Bangladesh (in tests) and Ireland a chance.
What else? Well, the scores are too high. The exceptional has become boring and if a team posts something too ridiculous batting first, the game loses any drama. Fielding restrictions should be loosened, also I think the batting powerplay is a bit of a nonsense really. Perhaps that ship has sailed and ODI fans are too bloodthirsty for run gluttony now, but let's get back to 350 being a phenomenal score, to 200 being a once-in-a generation thing.
That's it, really. I'm not saying you're guaranteed a more exciting tournament, but I do think a bit of expansion alongside a bit of simplification will do the trick.
Cricket pundits en masse have shown their rank hypocrisy by suddenly proclaiming the ludicrousness of the competition's reduction to 10 teams in 2019, when for years and years they've all been advocating just that and saying the presence of the associate minnows was a waste of time. Jonathan Agnew is the only one I've heard who has at least admitted that he's changed his mind, rather than just hoping people have no memory.
It is always to cricket's detriment that it is full of, at the same time, small-minded conservatism and knee-jerk reactions. Ad to that mix, over the last decade or so, gross cupidity and self-aggrandisement and it can all look rather ugly.
English cricket is, of course, its own unique mess right now. If only we could still put their ODI incompetence down to an insurmountable subconscious indifference to the shorter form, a stubborn but ultimately rewarding belief that test cricket is what really matters. Not applicable anymore, sadly. Not when you've shifted an Ashes Series just to prepare for an ultimately disastrous World Cup. Anyway, oh well, England are rubbish. So be it. Let's talk about something else.
How can cricket finally get its World Cup right? To me, it's pretty simple.
The "associates" brought a lot of the joy to this World Cup and also some of the best, most exciting matches. They all showed that they were capable of not embarrassing themselves (or considerably better in some cases) against test nations.
Yet there are undoubtedly too many matches, and the tournament goes on too long. There are 47 matches over 6 weeks. 8 from 14 teams go through to the quarters. I don't think you should have a format of more teams qualifying than not, however much hope that gives minnows like England ...
So, quite simply, increase to 16, have 4 groups of 4, 2 teams from each group qualify. More teams, fewer matches, 31 in fact, so you can polish the tournament off in less than a month, with barely a single wasted, inconsequential game.
Probably there'll be fewer mismatches, and there'll be good competition in each group, as the Seed 1 team will likely be tested by the Seed 2 team, the Seed 2 team might well be tested by the 3rd and maybe the 4th, the 3rd (this is the likes of Ireland and Zimbabwe) will have good games with at least the 2nd and 4th seeds, and the 4th seeds (Scotlands, maybe Kenya) will at least test the 3rd seed, and quite possibly the 2nd. The tournament won't have time to drift away, there'll be more chance of upsets, the lesser teams won't run out of gas from playing too many top teams, there'll be less inevitability. Simple really.
You can say a lot of bad things about the way football is run but it does open itself up to the whole world, there's no doubt about that. It's terrible that there is and has always been a strong strand in cricket that seems to want to keep it to 7 or 8 top teams. People forget it took over a decade for Sri Lanka to become a significant force. Let's keep giving Bangladesh (in tests) and Ireland a chance.
What else? Well, the scores are too high. The exceptional has become boring and if a team posts something too ridiculous batting first, the game loses any drama. Fielding restrictions should be loosened, also I think the batting powerplay is a bit of a nonsense really. Perhaps that ship has sailed and ODI fans are too bloodthirsty for run gluttony now, but let's get back to 350 being a phenomenal score, to 200 being a once-in-a generation thing.
That's it, really. I'm not saying you're guaranteed a more exciting tournament, but I do think a bit of expansion alongside a bit of simplification will do the trick.
Do you have a take on the BBC's recent attempt to statistically determine Britain's best ever test bowler?
ReplyDeleteIt was very silly, and they called it a "scientific study". It was one arbitrarily defined point with an arbitrarily defined ratio to determine one particular, interesting in itself, detail. It was genuinely one of the silliest things I've come across, not because it wasn't a nice little study, but because of what they claimed it was. Anyone could have done that with a pen and a spare 10 minutes, and yet they called it a "specially commissioned scientific study" ...
ReplyDelete