Sunday 20 February 2011

World Cup Opening Weekend

I'm contractually obliged in my new role as a Yahoo CommenTweeter not to massively slag off the ICC. So this isn't going to be the whole "The World Cup is stupid, the ICC is stupid" blog that this could have been.

Instead, I'm more questioning the logic of the fixtures. So far we've had three fixtures. India v Bangladesh was the obvious opening fixture, so no complaints with that. It had great atmosphere, great rivalry and was overall a good game (even if one side were always going to dominate it).

Sunday's games have been a bit different. Kenya played New Zealand, and Sri Lanka played Canada. Two obvious minnows against two established members of cricket's upper echelons.

While this World Cup is in it's infancy, surely the organisers would want some good, competitive games in order to ignite interest and excitement in the tournament. Two crushing defeats (which let's be honest, were always going to happen) didn't offer that. The ICC decide upon who plays each other, and when. Surely it would have made more sense to see a New Zealand v Australia, or Sri Lanka v Pakistan or something like that. That would have been more interesting, more engaging, and given this tournament an explosive start. As it is, we've stuttered into the World Cup, and it will need something much more exciting to kick start it and get us going.

So my non-anti-ICC point is that they could have picked better games to get us going, rather than the ones we saw today.

However, the ICC are a fantastic organisation, as are Yahoo, and Reebok, Hero Honda, Reliance, Castrol and Wonga.com

2 comments:

  1. If you want more evidence about illogical scheduling, take this. The coming Friday will see 2 matches (1 Day and 1 D/N). The Saturday and Sunday will see just 1 match each (both D/N). Then the Monday will have 2 matches again (1 Day and 1 D/N).

    Wouldn't it have made more sense to have 2 games (and especially Day games) on weekends... when crowds can attend!!? ICC is functioning on its Dubai schedule. They need to realise that Friday-Saturday is a weekend in Dubai... in the subcontinent, it is Saturday-Sunday!

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  2. Can't argue with that. The ICC just seem to get things consistently wrong...

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