Monday, February 21, 2011

This world cup format sucks...

 2 groups. 7 teams each, 4 teams who play cricket, and 3 who are learning. 4 from each group qualify for the quarter finals. Look carefully, all the good teams need to do is to beat those 3 dummy teams and you are into the quarter finals. Once in quarter finals, now, all a team needs is to play 3 days of good cricket and you will be the World Champions of cricket, immaterial of how good or bad you were during the league stage. Just 3 days of cricket to call somebody a champion? 

  Kenya vs Newzealand. A world cup match getting over in a little over 30 overs, a match which is expected to be played for 100 overs. I wonder who is going to watch these matches anyway. SriLanka thrashing Canada the same day though Canada resisted little better than the Kenyans. I feel no other sport would ever have had such a boring world cup matches. The real action in this world cup is going to start only from the Quarter finals, which means only the last 7 matches has the real meaning. People in one planet are screaming about the death of ODI's and here we are trying to kill it and that too in a world cup.

  The teams reaching the quarter finals is clear unless somebody really tries to kick themselves out. All these league matches being played is going to decide on thing: the quarter finals lot, who plays against whom in the quarter finals. Because of this reckless format, even the league matches against the top ranked countries is hardly going to evoke any interest since the result is just not going to matter. Imagine a  world cup format something like this: Only the top 8 cricket playing nations will play the world cup. Each team will play against the other  7 teams. The top 4  teams would qualify for the semis. Just imagine the kind of interest and curiosity each and every match would have created. This would have filtered out the real 4 good ones.

 Or atleast, the format of the last world cup was much better in which we had 4 groups, 3 teams were put in each group. 2 from each group will qualify to the super 8 where the real test begins. Now, we are back to the 96 world cup model. Any guesses why? India, the superpower of cricket, calls the shots. In the last world cup, India and Pakistan are out of the world cup even before the Super 8 stage, and alas, the sponsors, advertisers who are almost Indians, West Indies cricket board who hosted the world cup had very heavy losses. And hence, we are back to the old model wherein India is guaranteed to be in atleast till the quarter finals begin. Well sponsors should definitely make money, but they deciding the format of the world cup is a little more to digest. 

  Immaterial of howmuch ever we talk, when India play their match against the dummies Ireland or Netherland, we will still watch it, after all the sponsors now this is a cricket crazy nation :). When India and Pakistan got kicked out in the last edition, it upset us but many liked the format since it had the surprise package of big teams getting kicked out. Welcome to this ICC 2011 world cup which does not look to have any surprise whatsoever where things are expected to go as per the script.
  

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2 comments:

  1. Yeah.. I agree with you. A IPL kind of format is much better suited for such tournaments where each teams will play against all teams (In IPL all teams play each other twice, bot here once is enough) and top 4 will go for the semis.

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  2. exactly sudhi..thats what even i felt...

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