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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It is a tough life being an Associate cricketer. Twenty-five representative teams have played official One Day Internationals, and it is often in just the major tournaments that the smaller nations have the opportunity to pitch themselves against the big boys. In that respect, it is especially hard for those players to make an impact on the Reliance Mobile ICC Player Rankings as the matches they play are so few and far between. However, by virtue of their performances on the highest stage of all, some have managed to make their presence felt in the higher reaches of the tables.

Perhaps the greatest sustained performance by any Associate Member was Kenya’s staggering effort in the ICC Cricket World Cup 2003. Buoyed by victories over Canada, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, it reached the semi-finals before it was out-gunned by a Sourav Ganguly-inspired India at Durban. It was in that tournament that opening bowler Martin Suji achieved the highest-ever Rating by an Associate Member player. He ripped out the Zimbabwean top order at Bloemfontein on his way to figures of 3-19 in eight overs to set up a convincing seven-wicket triumph. By doing so, he lifted his bowling rating to 646 – good enough for twelfth place overall in a list headed by Shaun Pollock.

Suji’s team-mate Peter Ongondo is the only other Associate player to have reached the lofty heights of 600 points with either bat or ball. In October 2007, he sneaked up to 610 after taking 3-16 and 1-10 in consecutive victories against Bermuda in Nairobi. He is still hovering around the 500-point mark with young left-arm spinner Hiren Varaiya close behind him who could possibly be the man to challenge Suji’s long-standing record. Another one to watch is Kyle McCallan of Ireland who is also currently in the top fifty with the ball.

Moving to the batsmen, one player currently stands head and shoulders above the rest and that is the Netherland’s Ryan ten Doeschate. He reached 1,000 runs in One Day 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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Twenty20 cricket is the fastest growing new sport in the United States. And Indians, including some from Bangalore, are behind it?

Hold your breath. Cricket could be the next big thing in the United States. The gung-ho T20 format appears to have the caught the imagination of white, black and Hispanic youngsters across campuses and neighbourhoods in the US. And Indians, from places like Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai, apart of course from the influential diaspora, are proving to be the catalysts.

Venu Palaparthi, co-founder of DreamCricket.com, which runs a full-fledged cricket academy in the US, said: “Earlier, there used to be the notion in the US that cricket was played over many days, and produced little or no result. Every American allocates finite time for sports and leisure. These are still early days, but T20 is definitely making an impact in the US. Americans are willing to try new stuff.”

BANGALORE CONNECTION
There are a couple of Bangaloreans who are batting hard for cricket in the US. Venu Myneni is CEO of Radiant Info, the firm which organises and sponsors cricket tournaments in the US in a big way. Then there is Aravindan Pararajasingham, another co-founder of DreamCricket.com. There are a couple of Bangalore players too. Aditya Mishra, who represented Karnataka in a single Ranji season, is part of the New Jersey Daredevils squad, which participates in the American League, while 30-year-old Aditya Thyagarajan, a former Karnataka player, went on to don the Team USA national colours.

GRASSROOT PROGRAMME
The US already has 200 domestic leagues. In the state of New Jersey, there are five leagues, comprising some 200 teams, for hard ball cricket and another league for soft ball cricket. The growing popularity of the game can be gauged from the fact that 200,000 people Read more…

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A Test Championship is a great idea. The only trouble is that it is an idea whose time has not yet come.

Nobody has yet come up with a really workable schedule for a Test Championship, not even the most ingenious of thinkers about the modern game, Martin Crowe, New Zealand’s former captain, who made his proposals to MCC’s world cricket committee.

If a Test Championship with semi-finals and a final is desired, then can they each consist of one match, which would hinge on winning the toss on a flat pitch and batting first for several days?

To be fair, the semi-finals and final would have to consist of three Tests each so the rub of the green would be evenly spread; and if we allow for practice games and acclimatisation, we are talking of more than a month for each encounter.

To allow for three-match semi-finals and finals, an enormous amount of time would therefore have to be set aside in the calendar, with knock-on effects. If England reached the semi-finals, at home, they would have to cancel a tour by another country at short notice. Sorry, Australia, Read more…

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