Zimbabwe's Ray Price, in red, has a verbal exchange with Australia's Shaun Tait, center, after the dismissal of Zimbabwe's Graeme Cremer in the Cricket World Cup Group A match in Ahmadabad, India, Monday, Feb. 21, 2011.
As Edmund Blackadder once told nurse Mary Fleischer-Baum: “Back in England, I’m a 20-a-day man.” He was referring, of course, to both his smoking habit and its connection with his apparent sexual exploits.
But we might well say something similar about the cricket World Cup.
Remember 1975? Back in England, the Cup was a four-a-day tournament. Now, it’s more like a case of “wait-for-six-days” for most teams. Why? Aside from the obvious answer – maximising money for itself – can anyone else think of a particularly sound reason why the ICC insists on having one match per day for much of its flagship event?
Maybe CricInfo’s British humourist Andy Zaltman had the right idea in his February 21 blog – 24-hour cricket. That might just satisfy the diets of Indian fans.
“You have to be creative with the format – and some of the recent ones dreamt up look like they were the result of a drunken night out and a discussion with Salvador Dali,” as Zaltman put it so eloquently.
One English fan posted something similar on The Guardian‘s website on March 11 after the loss to Bangladesh. “This whole farce is an elongated exercise in extracting maximum revenue,” wrote the fan.
“We witnessed tired minds and tired bodies from England. Come home boys – you have won the Ashes and I for one want nothing more.”
If even the fans think it’s not worth any of their attention span at this length, why doesn’t the ICC listen for once? At the risk of sounding pedantically pathetic, even FIFA can manage to host more than double the teams in close to half the time. Admittedly, the average football game lasts half as long as a one-day international, but that’s not the point.
When there were three teams involved in the World Series every summer in Australia, teams would play, on average, once every two days. Hardly an assumption of player burn-out, then. A World Cup involves four times as many teams, and even less chance of burn-out, one would think, but no, the matches have to be spread over an even longer period.
The reason why the World Cup has become, in its current incarnation, such a seemingly mind-numbing and buttock-clenching bore is nothing to do with the quality of the teams, or even the host countries.
It’s the inability of the ICC to program a series that keeps the viewers interested – sure, Indian fans might happily sit through a week of watching everyone else play just to see their heroes again, but the wider world has probably tuned out by about week three. When the second round or quarter-finals should already be starting. But in ICC land it’s still just the first group stage…
Let’s look at this purely from a number-crunching perspective. What is the percentage of two-game (or more) days in a total schedule of playing days during each World Cup?
In 1975 it was a case of four-game days all the way until the semi-finals. Even then, there were two of those on the same day as well. The only stand-alone match was the final itself. Scarily, the process was repeated in identical fashion four years later.
Perhaps the English board was really onto something, folks? The organisers smartly stuck with something pretty similar in 1983, although it went back to two-a-day into the second round of the group phase.
Despite an equal amount of matches in the India/Pakistan edition in 1987, there was a considerable elongation of the tournament, but it still fit neatly within a month. The multiple games included four sets of two and one set of three. Less than a quarter of the World Cup was held with more than one match on any given day, and it still didn’t need to take an apparent eternity for TV viewers.
In 1992 the Cup opened with a double-header in Auckland (the early start – New Zealand v Australia) and Perth (the late start – England v India). Two-game days persisted at regular intervals that year, with triple-headers on March 15 and 18 to clear up the final preliminary fixtures prior to the semi-finals.
March 15 saw matches held in Wellington/Adelaide/Perth (when Adelaide still didn’t have lights, remember) while three days later it was Christchurch/Albury/Melbourne with the latter as the day-nighter. Again, the tournament lasted barely a month, and looking back now it seemed to be well drawn up and calendar-friendly.
What might surprise some was the fact that the 1999 subcontinent Cup included triple-headers, too – February 27 and March 6. On both occasions, at least one match included an associate nation, perhaps a rather sensible manner in which to get through the fixtures easily by pairing it with another blockbuster later on the same day (or night).
Interestingly, the quarter-finals that year were also split with two played per day, one day and one day-night match. Again, the entire competition went for just over a month.
By 1999 the second round had been introduced, and it caused a few scheduling headaches as every one of those additional nine games was played on its own day. Fortunately the Cup was held within a five-week period, but massive extension of that deadline looked imminent.
On to South Africa/Zimbabwe/Kenya in 2003 and it was a good mix of multi-game days and singles, with two triples returning to the tournament, too. Two out of those three matches on each day (February 16 and 19) featured associate teams. However, the entire competition now took six weeks to complete.
It was long, but certainly reasonably-paced when viewed in statistical hindsight, as more than half of the scheduled days for play had multiple matches on them.
The first stage of the 2007 Cup in the West Indies was brilliantly-structured – two games a day, every day, until a disastrously drawn-out second round began, reminiscent of the 1999 version, but with eight teams instead of six.
Ever felt bloated by too much cricket? The Cup had gone back to its early precursor of excess, 1987, only it was nearly twice as long by now.
So, the best-run tournaments were 1983, 1975, 1979 and then 2003 and 1996. The worst? 1987 and 2007.
The solution for the future? One game for the opening day of the tournament – two a day for the rest of the first phase. Even all five games (assuming a 10-team Cup) on the final first-round day – FIFA does it to avoid callusion between teams.
The ICC could think of the same idea and apply the same logic. Then two quarter-finals a day (subject to suitable venues). Semis and the final all on their own days of course.
Result? A shorter World Cup. At last.
Heck, you could even play two quarter-finals a day – one lesser match as a day-nighter, another at a suitable time-friendly venue as a day match. Australia and New Zealand had it right in 1992 – play day games in New Zealand that would finish in the mid-afternoon on Aussie tellies and then crank up a local day-night clash from Sydney or Melbourne. Brilliant – and it keeps the Cup moving.
Momentum isn’t gained by teams when they’re touring the sights of a city or sitting in the dressing room playing cards. It’s gained by actually getting out on the pitch and regularly proving themselves in proper match conditions. Failure to do so can leave the players stale – not well rested. And the fans will also feel that the cricket has become a stale product to boot.
And so we go back to 2011 – six more weeks of cricket which still hasn’t finished. You’d think the reduction of the second round to a simple four-straight quarter-finals would rescue the fixture, but no. Only 12 double-match days – a travesty, even when considering the travel requirements of teams across India/Sri Lanka/Bangladesh.
Clearly, the ICC could do much better. Even more scary is the fact that twice in the fortnight leading up to the Cup itself, there are two occasions where five warm-up games are played on each day. Five!
It’s obviously possible, ICC! You can manage it!
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