What Cricket's bloated World Cup could learn from football's balanced one
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Dileep Premachandran
As Cristiano Ronaldo was running into Orange Ivorian walls in Port Elizabeth, there was a terrific one-day international being played in Dambulla. Shahid Afridi's blazing 76-ball 109 nearly took Pakistan home, but it was Lasith Malinga's slingy accuracy (career-best figures of five for 34) that provided the last word as the hosts squeezed home by 16 runs. A significant number might have watched in Pakistan, but in India and Bangladesh, millions who would otherwise be on the cricket had eyes only for the World Cup.
Thanks to the scheduling, the Asia Cup, which should be cricket's answer to football's European Championship or the Copa América, has become the Who Cares Cup. With the final to be played on 24 June, when the jostling for last-16 places in South Africa will be intense, the continental showpiece is doomed to be another TV dud.
The tournament, first held in Sharjah in 1984, has gone from being played every two years to once in four years, and is now back to a two-year cycle. Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates took part in 2004 and 2008, allowing batsmen and bowlers alike to improve their statistics, but this year it is back to being a four-team event. Of those sides, Bangladesh have won twice in 26 Asia Cup matches.
The real value of the competition was illustrated when Sachin Tendulkar asked for time off to spend with his family. You can just imagine Fernando Torres or Wayne Rooney doing that at Euro 2012. Yet can you find fault with the greatest of one-day batsmen for wanting to stay away?
Meaningless one-day tournaments are piled on top of each other like shacks in a shanty town. A fortnight ago India's second-string were dumped out of the Micromax Cup by mighty Zimbabwe and a Sri Lanka B side led by Tillakaratne Dilshan. Again, TV ratings were poor, evidence, if any was needed, of viewer fatigue. There are endless debates about how one-day cricket can be revived from its sick bed. Few suggestions attack the primary tumour, the surfeit of meaningless games.
It is a malaise that has affected the Cricket World Cup as well. Brian Glanville regularly quotes a German journalist who once said of Sepp Blatter that he had 50 ideas a day, 51 of them bad. The Fawlty Towers types who run the bat-and-ball game should be grateful that Glanville does not write about their sport. Whatever rotten ideas Blatter has had, he still presides over the greatest show on earth, and its popularity skyrockets every four years.
Even in America, the England-USA match, kicking off in the afternoon rather than in prime time, was watched by 17 million, more than the viewership for the first four games of the NBA finals. It was also more than twice the number who watched the Stanley Cup decider.
In India and Bangladesh, the number watching the final stages will comfortably exceed 100 million. Already, Bangladeshi factories have been asked to work fewer hours so that there are fewer power outages at night, when the pictures are beamed in from South Africa.
The World Cup has a format that works perfectly. The lesser lights get 270 minutes, plus injury time, in the sun. After that, it is nail-biting time with a straight knockout. Excellence in the group stages means nothing as Denmark (1986), Nigeria (1998) and Spain (2006) discovered. Sometimes it is the slow starters (Italy in 1982 and 2006) who win the big prize. And all the drama is packed into 30 days, ensuring fewer divorces and fights over the remote control.
Contrast that with cricket's four-yearly epic. When it started, the World Cup spanned only 15 days. By 1987, when it was first played in the subcontinent, it lasted a month. In 1992, the best World Cup of all featured 39 games spread over 33 days. The International Cricket Council, though, were determined to fix that which wasn't broken. By 2007, when an interminable event sucked the life out of Caribbean crowds, there were 51 games across six weeks. With India and Pakistan going home early, the Eights turned out to be anything but Super, with only Sri Lanka showing signs of stopping the inevitable Australian procession.
You would think anyone who had witnessed such a shambles would learn from it. But no, the 2011 World Cup will be just as long, and potentially even more boring. Having revived the pulse by bringing back the quarter-finals, the ICC promptly gave the patient a lethal injection with a group stage that will test the patience of even cricket tragics. Ireland, Canada, Kenya and the Netherlands are all guaranteed six games, and four from each seven-team group will make it to the last eight. In other words, every precaution has been taken to ensure that India aren't runaway brides again.
Four groups of four would have given two more teams (maybe the promising Afghans) much-needed exposure, while significantly increasing the excitement factor. Instead, you have a situation where a team could lose three or even four group games, qualify for the quarters on net run-rate and then fluke a win over the best team in the competition. The blueprint was drawn during the subcontinent's last World Cup when West Indies (2-3 in the group, including a forfeit against Sri Lanka) beat South Africa (a perfect 5-0), though there was nothing fortunate about Brian Lara's brilliant century or the Proteas' boneheaded decision to rest Allan Donald.
Hopefully, those that have done their best to kill off the one-day game will be keeping an eye on happenings in South Africa, and learning how to stage a world-class event. Don't count on it, though. These days, the Indian board is the band-master and everyone else marches in step. They're no fans of Leopold Kohr and the concept that small is beautiful. With the next Indian Premier League season being 94 games long, we can only hope that they do not import enough vuvuzelas to leave us all uncomfortably numb.
Labels: ICC Cricket World Cup 2011
posted @ 1:36 PM,
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