A sure sign that the format of the Cricket World Cup is “outmoded and uncool” is that Bryan Adams was the star of the opening ceremony on Thursday, was the sniffy comment of a British newspaper last week.
“However you look at it, there’s something a bit rum about a 21st-century sporting event that opens with a performance from Bryan Adams,” said the London Evening Standard on Friday.
The British disdain for the marketing, hoopla and fiddling with the format of the game they invented 300 years ago is perhaps understandable.
But the Cricket World Cup is the third-largest event on the global sporting calendar after the soccer World Cup and the Summer Olympics.
Many hundreds of millions of dollars are riding on this marathon event, which started with the first match played at Bangladesh’s National Stadium on Saturday and will continue until April 2, when the final is due to be played at India’s Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.
To say that the International Cricket Council (ICC) has manipulated affairs to ensure a maximum audience and therefore maximum profits is to put it mildly.
If the rules had been followed, the three joint hosts — India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — should not have even been in the running.
They missed the March 1, 2006, deadline for bids for the 2011 contest. Indeed, only a joint application by Australia and New Zealand was delivered by the closing date.
But when the ICC members came to vote they plumped for the three South Asian nations plus, at that point, Pakistan. (The ICC stripped Pakistan of its host status in 2009 after a terrorist attack on a visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.)
The choice of the South Asian quartet was a commercial decision recognizing that in India, with its more than one billion population, cricket is a religion along with politics and Bollywood.
With that settled, the ICC then turned its attention to the fact that the last World Cup in the West Indies in 2007 was a commercial disaster.
That was because the Indian team with its vast audience of fans was knocked out of the contest early on, followed soon after by the other South Asian powerhouse, Pakistan.
So the ICC has now fiddled with the format to ensure that none of the big cricketing nations — India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and the West Indies — gets dismissed in the qualifying section.
There are 14 teams, including Canada, no doubt to the bemusement of the Evening Standard, and they are divided into two groups.
In the first round the seven teams in each group play each other once and the top four in each group go on to the quarter finals.
That means that each team plays a minimum of six games and that their appearance is not, as happened to India in 2007, shorter than the flight to the venue.
As former Australian captain Allan Border put it recently, “The way the tournament is structured you’ll have to play like absolute drongos not to get through to the quarter-finals.”
Drongo, for those unfamiliar with “Strine” slang, was the name of a race horse that was a total loser.
No doubt the ICC will consider its mission accomplished if India is one of the teams in the final match in Mumbai on April 2.
India hasn’t won the World Cup since 1983 and this will probably be the last tournament for the team’s star Sachin Tendulkar, the greatest batsman of all time.
But the ICC has also come in for a lot of criticism for insisting that the one-day games be of 50 overs of six balls each.
This is not as demanding as the classic five-day test match, but it is still a gruelling eight hours from early afternoon until after dark.
The ICC is getting a lot of free advice to shift to the Australia-invented fast and furious “Twenty20” format of each team batting for 20 overs, which has become the hub of the world’s multibillion-dollar cricket industry.
“However you look at it, there’s something a bit rum about a 21st-century sporting event that opens with a performance from Bryan Adams,” said the London Evening Standard on Friday.
The British disdain for the marketing, hoopla and fiddling with the format of the game they invented 300 years ago is perhaps understandable.
But the Cricket World Cup is the third-largest event on the global sporting calendar after the soccer World Cup and the Summer Olympics.
Many hundreds of millions of dollars are riding on this marathon event, which started with the first match played at Bangladesh’s National Stadium on Saturday and will continue until April 2, when the final is due to be played at India’s Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.
To say that the International Cricket Council (ICC) has manipulated affairs to ensure a maximum audience and therefore maximum profits is to put it mildly.
If the rules had been followed, the three joint hosts — India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — should not have even been in the running.
They missed the March 1, 2006, deadline for bids for the 2011 contest. Indeed, only a joint application by Australia and New Zealand was delivered by the closing date.
But when the ICC members came to vote they plumped for the three South Asian nations plus, at that point, Pakistan. (The ICC stripped Pakistan of its host status in 2009 after a terrorist attack on a visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore.)
The choice of the South Asian quartet was a commercial decision recognizing that in India, with its more than one billion population, cricket is a religion along with politics and Bollywood.
With that settled, the ICC then turned its attention to the fact that the last World Cup in the West Indies in 2007 was a commercial disaster.
That was because the Indian team with its vast audience of fans was knocked out of the contest early on, followed soon after by the other South Asian powerhouse, Pakistan.
So the ICC has now fiddled with the format to ensure that none of the big cricketing nations — India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and the West Indies — gets dismissed in the qualifying section.
There are 14 teams, including Canada, no doubt to the bemusement of the Evening Standard, and they are divided into two groups.
In the first round the seven teams in each group play each other once and the top four in each group go on to the quarter finals.
That means that each team plays a minimum of six games and that their appearance is not, as happened to India in 2007, shorter than the flight to the venue.
As former Australian captain Allan Border put it recently, “The way the tournament is structured you’ll have to play like absolute drongos not to get through to the quarter-finals.”
Drongo, for those unfamiliar with “Strine” slang, was the name of a race horse that was a total loser.
No doubt the ICC will consider its mission accomplished if India is one of the teams in the final match in Mumbai on April 2.
India hasn’t won the World Cup since 1983 and this will probably be the last tournament for the team’s star Sachin Tendulkar, the greatest batsman of all time.
But the ICC has also come in for a lot of criticism for insisting that the one-day games be of 50 overs of six balls each.
This is not as demanding as the classic five-day test match, but it is still a gruelling eight hours from early afternoon until after dark.
The ICC is getting a lot of free advice to shift to the Australia-invented fast and furious “Twenty20” format of each team batting for 20 overs, which has become the hub of the world’s multibillion-dollar cricket industry.
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