When it comes to the sanity levels of international cricket, it seems to be a case of half-step forward, three steps back.
The fantastic news of the past week relating to the ICC reconsidering its (let’s face it) utterly daft decision to reduce the 2015 event in Australia/New Zealand to just the 10 Test nations has now been smudged by New Zealand Cricket chief executive officer Justin Vaughan.
According to a CricInfo.com report on April 24, Vaughan is miffed that there’s no certainty about the number of teams for 2015 yet.
“From a host perspective, it’s very unhelpful to have uncertainty in regards to what the format of the competition is going to look like,” he told a Kiwi newspaper.
Like that’s ever seemed to worry the ICC before, with its chop-and-change approach to the tournament over the past 20 years.
There’s actually two concerns here – how many teams should there be in the World Cup and what should the fixture list look like based on said number of teams. Perhaps New Zealand Cricket should have thought about it with Cricket Australia before signing off on excluding the rest of the world from the “World Cup?”
Vaughan said he was sympathetic to Ireland and other Associate nations, and acknowledged that, to him, the “ideal” for 2015 would be 10 teams, based on “merit”, implying surely that a qualifying competition would seem the most rational solution to the Associates do-they/don’t-they issue.
However, he did state that fans prefer knowing where their team is going each week in the competition instead of a second round. What tosh.
“A ten-team competition works far better from a host perspective than a 12-team competition,” said Vaughan.
“The problem with [a] Super Six portion of the competition is that there’s no certainty around who is playing whom and where.”
Pah! His reasoning? Selling tickets to overseas visitors is “hugely” difficult if no-one knows who is doing what in the knockout round.
With respect, that is absolute rubbish. How many FIFA World Cup fans would pay through their proverbial noses, months in advance (if not years) for a quarter-final on the assumption that their team makes it? Plenty, I’d warrant.
A few fans were scathing – as expected – and couldn’t believe that a professional sporting organisation (let alone two of them, neighbours no less) had no ability to plan for 10, 12 or 14 teams and then simply pull out whichever format ends up being agreed on and go from there.
As one poster put it – what a challenge it must be to organise games four years in advance.
Imagine the FIFA, FIBA or IRB World Cups with just 10 teams… How dull!
Look at the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa: if you were a fan of the winning team Spain you’d have to go from Durban to Johannesburg to Bloemfontein (and that’s just the group stage).
Then there’s the unsure bit – where to in the second round? Most supporters are smart enough to be prepared with extra cash and prepared to wait it out at ticketing venues the next morning at 3am to get a ticket to those games as well. It went Cape Town, then back to Jo’burg for the quarter-final, then Durban again, then Johannesburg for the final.
If you followed India at the 2011 cricket World Cup you still had to traverse the length and breadth of the continent: Dhaka, Bangalore, Bangalore, New Delhi, Nagpur, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Mohali, Mumbai. Pakistani fans know the feeling, too – this was their itinerary from the 1992 edition: Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Perth, Christchurch, Auckland, Melbourne. The organisers – and everybody else in the cosmos – seemed to manage that without a mass fainting session. And come on, it’s not like New Zealand is a large country, you know…
Fans will do it. If they have the cash, they’ll be prepared to travel anywhere for a World Cup. Look at England’s supporters in cricket, football, rugby, etc. They’d pay thousands of dollars/pounds to fly 10,000 kilometres to watch their team at six different venues in the space of a month and think nothing of it.
And it all adds to the overall spectacle of the tournament itself. Doesn’t it?
Don’t you want to see the Blarney Army or the Oranje Army partying their way across the North and South Island – or is this just an exclusive boys-own club event for New Zealanders and Australians to enjoy?
I seriously hope Mr Vaughan and his counterparts at Cricket Australia actually are forced to alter their mind-sets, plans and scheduling lists. If Australia and New Zealand cannot cope with organising anything beyond a 10-team one-day international tournament then perhaps they don’t deserve to host anything with the words “World” and “Cup” attached to it ever again.
That same year Australia will host the Asian Cup football tournament. Guess what – some teams won’t know where they will finish (and hence where their quarter-final may be played) until three weeks into the event. That’s called totally normal, Mr Vaughan. That’s called an international sporting series held over the best part of a month in more than three cities.
If Germany can host 32 football nations in 2010, Australia/New Zealand can host 10 cricketing ones in 2015. If New Zealand – and New Zealand alone, mind you – can host 20 rugby nations this very year, it can manage roughly half of whatever the ICC World Cup will come to in 2015. Deal with it, people! It’s called a World Cup for a reason, you know!
Meanwhile, my personal view remains unchanged. Fourteen teams may be a pipe-dream, but 12 sounds like the thing the Associates should really push for.
Anything less and it’s hardly a World Cup worthy of the moniker – and probably not worth your money at the gate.
Make a stand, guys – twelve teams, two groups of six, quarters, semis, final. Done. In not more than a month, please, with two matches a day during the first round.
As Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson would put it: “How hard can it be?”
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