Hosts hope global gathering repairs their reputations

In Bangladesh, beggars have been paid to keep off the streets, £60m has been spent giving buildings a new lick of paint and Bryan Adams, along with 3,000 folk dance performers, is busily limbering up for the opening ceremony. In Sri Lanka, officials at Hambantota are hoping monsoon rains hold off and do not spoil their careful preparations in the home district of the country's president, Mahinda Rajapaksa. In India, where cricket is followed like nowhere else on earth, locals are praying that the nation can secure the title and by doing so provide the only piece of silverware missing from the trophy cabinet of the sporting deity that is known as Sachin Tendulkar.

The 2011 Cricket World Cup officially gets underway today, with the 51-year-old Canadian rocker Adams headlining the opening event in the Bangladesh capital, Dhaka. The tournament's first match takes place two days later in the city's Sher-e-Bangla stadium when Bangladesh take on India (one of the hosts' opening games, therefore, strangely being played abroad).

Across the three south Asian nations hosting the tournament – Pakistan was to have been the fourth but that changed following the 2009 militant attack on the Sri Lankan team – anticipation has been building. It is true that the buzz is not as feverish as some may have expected, but officials believe that once the games start, so the excitement will grow. "It's more than a smell of cricket in the nostrils. It has a tear-gas effect," wrote the former Indian player Ravi Shastri, the man named player of the tournament in 1983 when India won the event and triggered a new wave of one-day mania across the country. "Everything around us has been sprayed with the World Cup coming up. Everyone is hoping it lives up to its billing."