CRICKET’s World Cup is still too long and remains cluttered with meaningless matches.

The tedious format of the International Cricket Council’s showpiece may have been changed and reduced by a week but the schedule released yesterday for 2011 in the sub-continent is another damning example of television ruling sport.

While the missionary zeal of opening the tournament to lesser nations may have been well-meant in the comfortably paced, almost amateur 1970s, the hectic nature of modern international cricket has made matches against the minnows irrelevant.

With Australia playing its 40th one-day international this year against India in Mumbai tonight, there are already so many meaningless matches in an overcrowded program the ICC should be scheduling fewer more meaningful matches. Two groups of seven will play each other in the next World Cup, meaning teams such as Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ireland, Canada and The Netherlands will each play six matches before the quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals.

The first match is between co-hosts Bangladesh and India in Dhaka on February 19 and the final is not until April 2 in Mumbai.

Australia will spend the first month of the tournament playing just six matches, an average of one every five days, with three of them against non-Test countries Zimbabwe, Canada and Kenya.

Instead of getting the meaningless matches out of the way, the program has been stretched out for television, with no more than two games programmed on any given day.

The ICC tried a four-group format during the endless, soulless 2007 World Cup in the West Indies but that backfired when Pakistan lost to Ireland and India lost to Bangladesh, putting a big hole in the tournament and sub-continent television audience.

With the current format, each country, including the all-important India, must play at least six matches and India would be expected to make at least the quarter-finals. Test opener Simon Katich said that the amount of cricket was a “worry” for the players involved in all three forms of the game and it was important for his performance to have time at home. “They are Read more…

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No sooner have we done with the Champions Trophy than thoughts turn to the 2011 World Cup with the announcement of the draw for the competition’s group stages.

We all remember the last World Cup (it is hard to forget something that had more flab than Chubby Chandler): 16 teams playing 51 games over 47 agonising days. We were told that there would be no repeat of that West Indies debacle but with World Cup commercial agreements and the Future Tours Programme long in place, more of the same is in store in 2011.

To be fair to David Morgan and the ICC they have done what they can – the tournament has indeed been cut, from 16 teams to 14, but with a negligible reduction from 51 games to 49. They’ve changed the format too – the four groups of four of 2007 replaced by two groups of seven from which the top four teams advance to the Super Eights, semi-finals and final. But there is only so much you can do with something that is inherently broken.

This change of format is something of a good news/bad news scenario for the lesser teams. They are guaranteed a minimum of six games before elimination but this in turn lessens their chances of progression through to the Super Eights and raises the possibility of a host of meaningless games being played out in the group stages. That the tournament will be shared across three Asian countries – India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – adds to the element of farce.

It looks good for England though – they’ve avoided Australia and been granted an opportunity to avenge their T20 humiliation by the Dutch. India and Pakistan have also been kept Read more…

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