Thursday, April 26, 2007

Cricket World Cup 2007

This is the most boring World Cup ever seen. With not a single country managing to give even something of a fight to Australia and not a single exciting match on show. With only a few matches that can be counted as exciting - Zimbabwe v/s Ireland, Pakistan v/s Ireland, West Indies v/s England - this World Cup can be remembered with only one word - boring.
Hardly any exceptional performances - Lasith Malinga's four-off four is the only exploit that can be remembered for times to come.

With so many "world events" happening - the champions trophy happened less than an year ago and the 20-20 world cup is round the corner - it seems that the Cricket World Cup, which is supposed to be the show piece event of World Cricket, has lost its value to most teams. They seem to be fatigued and bored. With countries like India treating the World Cup matches as just another match, the excitement of cricket seems to have been on the wane.

It is time ICC does some radical rethinking on its strategy of how many matches a country should play in a year and also how many show piece world events should be there. Unless this is done the Cricket World Cup is in grave danger of being reduced to just another tournament with stakes that no one cares about.

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