AND SO IT CAME TO PASS. Not just Star India’s but the ICC’s worst nightmare became a reality Sunday after India were officially knocked out of the running for a place in the T20 World Cup 2021 semi-final line-up.
And even as the calculators and tea leaf readings could be finally (pun intended) done away with, cricket’s world governing body perforce has to confront a harsh reality. Which is that even a surfacial reading of the the match-ups this “world event” delivered threw into stark relief the sheer lack of competitive edge that ran through pretty much the whole tournament.
Before going into that, the fixtures for the “business end” of the ICC T20 World Cup:
Semi-final 1: England v New Zealand at Abu Dhabi, 10 November
Semi-final 2: Pakistan v Australia at Dubai, 11 November
Final: Sunday, 14 November
(Matches start at 6:00pm local time, 7.30 pm IST)
Back to the subject at hand. Twelve games in the qualifying rounds (featuring world cricket’s minnows and down in the dumps Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) and 31 games in the tournament proper, leading up to the semis and finals (coming up on November 10, 11 and 14) have thus far provided a veritable yawn-fest.
Looking back on the tournament, here’s how it reads:
1. The group stages of the event proper kicked off October 13th with Australia thrashing South Africa and ends Monday, November 8 (with India expected to thrash Namibia).
2. When India was walloped by New Zealand on October 31 (just game 28 of the 46-game tournament) the semi-final line-up of England, Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand was already clear (exhortations of tea leaf readers and “experts” sitting with calculators notwithstanding).
To quote verbatin from a comment made to SportzPower by an industry expert on October 29 (emphasis ours) ahead of the India-New Zealand game: “So whoever wins on Sunday (October 31) between India and NZ will occupy the fourth semi-finals spot. Post that the World T20 will be a bore (if India were to lose) and (host broadcaster) Star might face real challenges in viewership, especially if India lose on the day.” Read: Star counts costs of Team India’s losing out at T20 World Cup
3. Even as the talk will inevitably be around how the ICC will face serious challenges from Team India’s flop show when it announces the invitation to tender (ITT) for its next media rights cycle (expected to be for four years), not enough attention is being paid to the challenges the world body faces over the serious lack of competitiveness that has been the recurring theme of this tournament. From pathetic first innings totals, to the ease with which the top four in the tournament reached where they reached, and add the fact that India would have been competitive against the Top 4 ONLY IF they batted second, the ICC miserably failed to make a case for itself as far as the value TO FANS for engaging with the World T20 was concerned.
4. The performance of defending champions West Indies, who proved a sorry caricature in this event, was the very embodiment of that “failed case”.
To be clear. All this is NOT an outcome of the luck of the draw, but the obsession the ICC has had with financial management rather than where the game is going over the last decade and more. The lament across media over these past few years has been that Test cricket is dying because of the focus on T20 cricket. If this is the best that T20 has to offer the world then the managers of the game in the world body as well those in the territory that matters the most (read BCCI’s head honchos) need take a hard look at themselves.
POSTSCRIPT: The points table from the Asian qualifiers (as on 29 October) for next year’s World T20 global qualifiers’ spots were extremely close and delivered exciting games on digital platform FanCode.
As an industry expert told SportzPower: “This is how cricket should have been made a global sport a decade ago.” With vision not being the strong point of the manager of the financial centres of world cricket (read BCCI and the other 2 big guns England & Wales Cricket Board and Cricket Australia), that would have been asking for the moon.
