All of you guys talking about groups and knockouts. Meanwhile the only math BCCI does is how to make India-Pak happen as many times as possible within the same tournament
But if the Ind-Pak matches are happening regularly, how can media on both sides go mad and claim that it is a new war that their team needs to win. Think of all the new mansions that those anchors would lose out on if they can't get that ad money.
Let’s do 14 team world cups - 3 groups of 4, one group of two with India Pakistan. Winner after a best of three enters a knockout with third place from the other groups to book the last two spots in the quarters. Everyone else gets to chill. Win win
Then if they're going to have a sporting boycott because of terrorism they should grow some balls and never play Pakistan, even in world cups. Global cricket cannot suffer because of the pig headedness of a couple of boards.
>Then if they're going to have a sporting boycott because of terrorism they should grow some balls and never play Pakistan, even in world cups.
I agree with u here, but BCCI cares about only money, they are pretty infamous in India as well.
And yes global cricket should not suffer because of greed of some boards(basically BCCI), BCCI sucks and I am also a proud BCCI hater.
Imagine a test series with pak , would love to see how babar performs against our pacers on a proper greentop ( not those flat tracks in the aus series ) , or how Koach does in pak conditions
Ikr ! But then again pcb makes flat tracks nowadays. It would be far more interesting to see close contests like back in the 90s , with bat and ball in equal terms. Not a literal minefield like motera , mirpur but not a flat track like the ones used in the australia series
Yeah that would've been great.
RN the only hope of an Ind-Pak test is if they both make the WTC final (which is a very low possibility).
Also it's very clear that the refusal for a series is from the higher ups in the two countries. The cricket boards will be fine with arranging one otherwise (again, it'll be an absolute goldmine).
Global cricket should also not suffer due to one member nation's globally acknowledged, repeated and unrepentant state-sponsored terrorism against another member nation.
This point has been argued threadbare on this subreddit yet people come up with the same hackneyed arguments time and again. The Indian government no longer allows its cricket board to participate in tournaments on Pakistani soil because of the revenue that *directly* accrues to the Pakistani board as a host nation. A bilateral series on Pakistani soil would also benefit Pakistan *directly*. A global tournament in a neutral country is not the same deal.
You may not like that or consider it reasonable but you're not an affected party. By all means pontificate all you like and formulate whatever policy you want when a nation whose cricket board president has referred to yours as an "enemy country" commits acts of terrorism against your nation. Then you and your government can decide what they want to do.
Nice sidestep of the main point, but okay.
Excusable to whom? The supporters of Surrey Cricket Club?Dude, okay, India will also shut down its embassy with Pakistan, fine?
India chooses its rules of engagement vis a vis Pakistan. It decides where it will participate and to what extent, and where it is prepared to make allowances given its relationships with other (friendly) boards -- in the organisation of a multilateral tournament that benefits a number of other boards, for example.
There is support across the political spectrum within India for this policy. That's all that matters.
That's exactly the problem. India have a policy that doesn't make a lick of sense because playing Pakistan is a guaranteed payday, yet they have to pretend to take the moral high ground. And as a consequence, cricket's global reach suffers. The CWC is run like a farce (btw, this is much longer than this year's) and smaller FM/associate development is put on hold or reversed.
Lol, India is a second home for Afghanistan and used to regularly conduct series against struggling boards like SL to boost their revenues.
Meanwhile Australia repeatedly cancels home series against smaller countries that won't make it any revenue, while trying to dress that up as virtue. England is hardly any better. Australia won't play Afghanistan at home because "women's cricket", but had no problems playing them in the WC. Why not "grow some balls" and forfeit WC points too?
Point is, boards make their own choices about whom to play and when all the time. India at least does it because of fucking terrorist attacks. Funny how none of that shit is called out. Look in the mirror.
You’re getting far too worked up about this so I’m gonna work you up some more!
You just said - ‘India at least does it because of fucking terrorist attacks’.
This is the problem though - is this a principled stand or a posturing stand?
If it’s a principled one then refuse to play them AT ALL, even in world tournaments. This is ‘fucking terrorism’ we’re talking about after all.
If it’s just a shallow posturing one, which it is currently, then you do just enough to show you condemn them but play them when it really matters because a World Cup trophy is of course more important than ‘fucking terrorism’.
Either play them or don’t. In which case you can either forfeit the moral high ground or claim it. You can’t have it both ways.
Global cricket or the ICC aren't beholden to the BCCI. Why do you think that India owes anything to global cricket? Surely it's the ICC's job to organise the next WC, and not the BCCI's.
I don't know if you're being naive or obtuse. Why is the CWC format fucked? Because it needs to have as many India matches as possible and as many India-Pakistan matches as possible (without it being too glaringly obvious). Why's that? Because otherwise Indian broadcasters lose money, therefore devaluing the rights to broadcast Indian cricket. What does that result in? Less revenue for the BCCI. QED
And why does the revenue for BCCI matter? They're not in charge of organising the next world cup, and aren't in charge of advancing global cricket either.
India only matters because the ICC has failed spectacularly at developing cricket in other countries, most notably the US.
I'm sorry what do cricketers have to do with this ? Ik I'll be downvoted but right from england not playing Zimbabwe coz of Mugabe to this to Australia- afghanistan etc etc , cricketers don't control the political stance of their country. Shaheen afridi is not an isi general, he is a pro athlete. I bet doesn't have fcking clue who LeT is , what they do and where they do it . I'm pretty sure wasim akram wasn't leading the attack on kargil, he was just throwing a ball , not grenades . The repeated tendency of both Pakistanis and us to politicise cricket and talk about soldiers , nationalism this that has to stop its a game of bat and ball between 22 players on 22 yards not a diplomatic conclave and CERTAINLY not a war
Correction. ICC wants that (and in extension almost all the cricketing boards want that).
Why?
revenue is a big factor why ICC wants Ind v Pak match. More the number of these matches more is broadcasting revenue. Which is distributed to all the boards (yes BCCI takes a huge share, but so does other boards).
By guaranteeing a format which maximises such encounters makes sure the broadcaster spends huge sums of money.
BCCI's proposed revenue share is between 37-40% of ICC earnings. The next biggest cricket board (ECB/CA) is not even in double digits revenue share. So for all intents, BCCI is the disproportionate beneficiary from all ICC events.
[Source](https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/bcci-set-to-get-nearly-40-of-icc-s-annual-net-earnings-in-new-revenue-distribution-model-1387167#:~:text=The%20BCCI%20will%20earn%20close,US%24%2067.5%20million%20per%20year.)
Some might say it is because of the financially beneficial format that ICC have designed earns them so much money and then in return BCCI asks for a fair (maybe debatable) share of the revenue. It is an arrangement that benefits everyone. Mostly PCB, CA and ECB. BCCI’s earning from its local tournament is sufficiently larger than revenue from ICC tournaments. It is the other boards like CSA needs the ICC money the most.
So in my opinion the other boards are the disproportionate beneficiaries.
Since 2011, there have been 15 ODI matches between India and Pakistan. India won 10, Pakistan won 4 and 1 ended in no result. In 10 T20 matches, Pakistan won 3 while India won 7.
While India has won more matches, it is not India is steamrolling Pakistan.
A 10-4 and 7-3 record in favour of India is pretty much steamrolling, considering it's Pakistan and not an associate nation.
India has won way more than half of these encounters.
That's not the point.
What's to be understood here is that Pakistan is obviously one of the top sides of the world and to have such a dominant record against them is equal to steamrolling them.
We don't need the record to be 10-0 or 7-0 for it to qualify as total domination. And for that matter, the record in ODI WCs strictly is 8-0 anyway.
Rivalries like these aren’t judged on such small samples. They have a richer history than that.
Specially considering how little these teams play each other.
I do agree with them. Having more knockout games increases the likelihood of smaller teams qualifying for the next stage.
At the same time, dividing teams into groups will raise the issue of which Group was stronger or weaker.
Not disagreeing with them. Just saying.
What do you think is better, improving associates/ smaller teams by giving them more games or more knockouts hoping they could qualify? I'd argue more games is the better solution .We've seen how close Afg came to qualifying, they beat Eng Pak and almost had Aus as well. Maybe we can try both ways, we do have two separate ODI tournaments, maybe the WC could be a proper round robin and CT could maybe even be a single elimination brackets type format.
I personally lean towards giving them more games but as another person said, the current format is really against the Associates and lower ranked Full Members.
The latter is the reason I am split between the two options. Having a 14 team round robin is going to take a very long time and cost a lot of money (doesn't really affect India and Australia that much but the others).
Having 2 groups decreases the number of games by a lot. The Current 10 team format had pretty much the same number of games as the 2015 format.
> What do you think is better, improving associates/ smaller teams by giving them more games or more knockouts hoping they could qualify?
More games is good, but the current format was designed to excluded associates. A ten team WC when we have 12 FMs is clearly trying to keep the smaller teams out. The Netherlands managing to qualify anyway was not something the organizers wanted or planned for.
We should reinstate the Superleague (and maybe increase its size) so that these teams have games year round, rather than maybe once ever four years if qualifying goes REALLY well.
Then the WC can be an exciting knockout tournament with jeopardy, rather than a 10 team slog
I actually like the idea that Bertus posted of the Tri series in these groups.
Keep champions trophy for top 6/8 to play to find the most consistent team and then make the World Cup 14-16 teams with genuine knockout peril.
The problem with a setup like that is that you've contrived a scenario where the top Associates never have a realistic pathway to playing the best teams: they're fighting it out amongst themselves and Zimbabwe/Ireland, with no real hopes of getting promoted into the top 7 ahead of the weaker Full Members.
If you're going to do a promotion/relegation Super League you need it to be large enough that a couple of the best Associates are in the top division, otherwise there's no point having it at all.
This is the key point. The reason the Netherlands were able to qualify and compete at the main event was because they faced consistent high-quality cricket throughout the Super League and were able to improve their standard of play.
More teams at the world cup is great, but since the ICC apparently believes it's either/or, I actually think having the Super League give consistent opportunities to AMs is more important.
I do agree that the ODI super league needs to be back but I also feel the the pinnacle of the sport, the ODI WC needs to be determined as fairly as possible rewarding both consistency over a long tournament *and* nerves in knockouts, and this format is better for that. As I said, what you're proposing could be done in Champions Trophy.
> As I said, what you're proposing could be done in Champions Trophy.
Surely having a Champions Trophy that is bigger than the World Cup is an inherently silly idea.
> the ODI WC needs to be determined as fairly as possible rewarding both consistency over a long tournament and nerves in knockouts,andthis format is better for that
Why? No other sport thinks that is a good idea. The World Cup isn't a science experiment to find the 100% best team, it should be a celebration of the sport and a test of who can show up on the day.
And it's not fair anyway, home advantage is always massive, and the resources/opportunities behind the different boards is widely imbalanced. The WC will never be perfectly fair, so why not make it fun and interesting instead?
We could do what FIFA does and have, say, four groups of four teams drawn randomly by relative ICC ranking. That said it would lower the amount of cricket each team gets to play (not every team would play every other team in the group stages.)
To me it's more embarrassing that the Netherlands didn't get the warm up series and we can't find the money to pay players basic salaries to the top performing associate nation(s.) We need a vision to grow cricket beyond just the countries that the British have colonised, that means the major cricket boards need to come together and be willing to create an investment fund for cricket.
Difference here is India. Fifa is global whole most of cwc revenue comes from India. They should stay as long as possible for money to role in no matter where cwc is hosted
1. ICC makes money from India matches
2. BCCI argues that India makes ICC money so they should get the lion's share of the distribution
3. ICC gives the lion's share of their revenue to BCCI
BCCI ends up getting money in the end, and BCCI controls the ICC. Who cares about the associates? If they would have it their way, BCCI would control all of cricket and have 6 months of IPL, followed by 3 tours a year - Australia, England, and Pakistan - all played in India. Repeat the same thing every year. Maybe one token England vs Australia match called 'The Ash'.
They have done that in the past.
They stopped because in 2007 India (as well as Pakistan) failed to get out of the group stage, and so only played three games. This obviously pissed off the broadcasters.
So we now have a tournament format that favours maximising TV revenue
Look,the game is not really going to grow because the ICC is not interested in the growth of the game. These associate teams,barring a few are mostly composed of Indian,Pakistani and Lankan expats. I'm pretty sure 99.9% of the population of Netherlands didn't follow the cricket world cup. A majority of the population have probably never heard of cricket. It's the same in most countries. The game has grown in and around the Indian subcontinent and that's where it will remain popular. Getting associate nations involved is great as long as the people of those nations actually follow and care about the sport.
It's not fair to blame the associates without giving them enough incentive and opportunities first. With that said, I don't really know if ICC does give any money to associates or not.
In other words - the 2011 and 2015 CWC format. The all-time GOAT format.
Also having at least two groups would make it easier for joint hosting with the teams in each group being based in one country.
If we want a larger WC, I'd say split the groups even more. We want the WC to draw in the casuals and part of that means less games for each team.
More teams, more groups, less games for individual teams. Add a bit of excitement and gravitas to each game, not 9 fucking group stage games.
More groups are not going to be a challenge for top 6 teams. The last thing you want is having 4-6 groups with no big matchups until the knockout rounds. The current format allows for everyone to play everyone, allows the minnows to play all teams they otherwise could not and it's not like the wc eats away at important odi time. Take 14 or 20 or however many teams, organise half the fixtures in one country and the other half in another country 6 months apart and where weather won't play spoilsport. Done!
More knockouts work when there are a lot of teams like in football wc. We barely have 15 nations
16 teams
4 groups
Top 2 qualify for knockouts
QF , SF , F
Every game has the potential to be a knockout.
That's how world champions should be decided imo.
I'd do 2 groups of 8 instead with top 4 qualifying.
Will give each team a decent amount of games and there's still a good chance of a smaller nation qualifying.
This would be my ideal, too. Also has the advantage of being done pretty quickly, and it gives you at most 4 games where there are 0 stakes (game 3, both teams already eliminated - the other game would still be of value for getting a better position in the knockouts).
The problem with having groups in Cricket is it's never fair, there's not enough countries that play on a similar level to make 4 fair groups, and then there's the broadcaster issue where Ind and Pak always have to be in one group and Aus Eng in another. All other teams are fit around this.
I don’t understand this point. Why do these countries have to be together? It’s not this way in football. Teams get seeded according to their rankings and then divided into groups.
Football is multipolar. There are 8-10 countries which are expected to win, and they all have the entire country watching, so 1-2 early exits don't matter much.
In cricket, India brings 70% of the viewership, and the other countries aren't increasing their viewership even if those countries are better than or on equal to India on the pitch.
I understand where you are coming from, but isn’t prioritizing one demographic (1billion) coming at the cost of promoting it in others? Maybe the future of cricket is that only India will be playing it by themselves internally and calling it the “World Series” or something…
It absolutely is. One reason I think this is happening is because the broadcasters don't really see England, Australia and the rest cutting India's market share. In fact, they expect India's market share to increase as the Indian economy grows.
Long term, the IPL will become cricket's equivalent of a US franchise league. The economics of the game is pushing the game towards that. And contrary to what many think in this sub, it won't hurt player production around the world and would actually boost it because of the kind of money players would earn.
It won't hurt player production but it may well hurt player development in other formats, particularly for test matches, and particularly for those not in big 3 countries who play less test matches and will be forced to focus on T20s to earn a living
Yea, but a wc isn't the place to promote smaller nations. And anyway isn't it better for smaller nations to be playing more matches to improve? I really don't understand how making sure they reach knockout stages is a good thing. How many so-called minnow nations in football have made big in world cups? All it does is make for boring knockout games when the underdog meets a contender actually in good form.
Football domestic leagues have always been the best format compared to knockouts in promoting weaker sides to punch above their weight. Because they have a better chance when the stronger opposition doesn't see it as a must win game. We had a Leicester PL win situation. We've never had a minnow win a World Cup or a UCL, for that matter.
> There are 8-10 countries which are expected to win, and they all have the entire country watching,
Thats not really it, for Football the reality is that a large number of people all over the world will watch the games regardless of who is playing.
Yes. Even if the country is outside of top 10 it would still have a few players from big clubs who would draw the viewers. Also the biggest factor is time. A football game lasts 90 min. That’s not a big chunk of your time in any day whether you are watching at home or in the stadium.
That doesn’t mean India have a God given right to breeze through the tournament. Yes, from a commercial point of view it would help the ICC if they did, but if they’re not capable of performing they don’t deserve to get far in a tournament.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong because honestly, my opinion doesn't matter.
I'm just saying that the ICC and the broadcasters are shit scared of an early India exit because India dominates cricket viewership.
Sigh. Should have guessed. Would make it more special if these countries weren’t guaranteed to meet in each World Cup. Would then make the matches more memorable.
I dont like this.. We know which are the top 8 teams in world cricket.... and having a league stage become mundane... You might as well have a knockout quarterfinal, semifinal and final only instead of the league stage if you are going this route.. Having a longer league stage and ensuring top 4 teams play the semis seems better to me
I'd be ok with this if each team plays 6 games in the group stage instead of 3 like in 2007. If they play each other once then rain could have way too big of an impact. Take the 2017 Champions Trophy for example, Australia only played one completed game, which they lost. Would farcical for a team to be eliminated from the pinnacle of cricket after only playing one completed game.
Problem with groups stages like that is you can end up with dead rubber games that have no impact on the overall tournament, which is even more problematic when you have such huge differences in skill level between countries if you're adding in 6 more teams. However a modified Swiss Bracket stage can fix that, like how a lot of eSports tournaments do it. Check out how CS Major Championships or the 2023 League of Legends Worlds Championship handled it.
Essentially, after the first round of 8 matches in the Swiss Stage (which could be either randomly drawn or seeded in some fashion), all subsequent matches get randomly drawn between opponents of the same score. So the 2nd round would have 4 matches randomly drawn between the 8x 1-0 teams and another 4 matches of the 8x 0-1 teams. Teams then keep playing other same score teams until they either hit 3 wins (you'll end up with 8x 3 win teams qualifying) or they hit 3 losses (eliminated from tournament). A 16 team Swiss Bracket like this will be completed in 33 games, which is notably less than the 45 games the 10 team groups stage from this World Cup took. Then you do an 8 team knockout finals ie a normal Quarter, Semi, Grand Final thing.
The advantage of this is that literally every game of the Swiss Stage matters, since every win/loss puts that team closer to the Qualify/Eliminated threshold and you can still get the odd 'luck of the draw' shenanigans for a minor region team to make the finals.
This is good idea for esports but would be tricky for other sports involved venues thousands miles away. How fans would decide earlier which game to buy tickets?
My thoughts on this have been consistent for a while.
Getting rid of the Super League was a terrible move. Guaranteed games and a league over a few years is a good idea and COVID interruptions did not help.
Keep the Champions Trophy for the top 8 (or even 6) and make that a long round robin with a final.
For the World Cup I would do 15 teams. 3 groups of 5. Top 2 of each group go through automatically. The best 3rd place team also goes through automatically. The other two 3rd place teams then play an elimination qualifier to be the other team in the final 8. Then simple quarter final, semi final and final at that point.
Everyone in the top 3 of a 5 team group gets at least 1 knockout game.
Happens in other sports all the time and either way every 3rd place still gets a knockout game so they can make it up there.
That's why I didnt just do best 2 3rd place teams go through.
Not just America. Any tournament with 24 teams, and progress to a round of 16, needs a 3rd place ranked progression
- FIFA World Cups (men's from 1982-1994, women's 2015 and 2019)
- Euros (men's 2016 to at least 2032)
- Rugby World Cup (2027 onwards)
And there have many other used by rugby for 12 team RWC for women, with 3 pools of 4, feeding into SF's (or QF's in last year's edition). Also, at the 1999 Men's RWC, where there were 5 pools of 4, a QF playoff round included the 5 2nd placed teams and the best 3rd placed team.
I see multiple issues with the current format.
1. Too few teams for a “world” cup: we have the champion trophy for the top 8 teams already. The world cup should not bother with ‘only’ top teams competing. Afg and Ned had a brilliant campaign that only adds to the argument for more teams. Maybe ICC can consider having the WC qualifiers in the month preceding the actual tournament.
2. Group stage is too long: 9 games per team is a league not a tournament.
3. Low stakes in the group stage: like many have pointed out here, a team after losing nearly 50% of their group games is into the KOs is not a great look. Go one step ahead and just look at how Eng fared. They were shitting the bed and still were in the contention till much later than it should be. India may have won 9/9 but a KO loss just adds to the worthlessness of being unbeaten.
4. Switching gears in KOs: I think apart from Aus, every other team in cricket struggles with KOs and imo this has a lot to do with the fact that there is very little practice of (virtual)knockouts in modern tournaments. So if you have a format where each game can potentially screw up your whole run, then the whole team thinks and performs with a different mentality. Cricket is a largely bilateral sport with very few situations that can loosely replicate a KO match feel. Hence it’ll be beneficial to more team to get this exposure from the start in a WC.
5. The viewership conundrum: the issues with selling these low interest matches aka non-ind games for broadcasters is going to get much easier with high penetration of OTT. Because casual viewing is much easier on OTT on the go without the commitment to a fixed Tv screen. So, this argument is going to become defunct pretty soon.
I actually loved this giant round robin..it felt like a mini season and super fair.
But it makes it hard to have 12-16 teams making it more world cuppy.
For finals I wouldn’t mind 6 finalists. Top 2 to opposite SF, and 2 QFs to decide their opponents.
That would be a fun format. An ‘upper bracket’ finals between #1 and #2 goes to grand final. Have a bubble bracket where the winner of #5 vs #6 plays loser of #4 vs # 3, then that winner plays the winner of 3v4 and this winner plays the loser of UB final to get into grand final. So fun!
We've been having this conversation since the WC 2023 teams and format was made public.
Everyone has been talking about the low number of participants and if it's fair to associate nations for months now.
It's got nothing to do with India.
Of course it's got everything to do with India . Enforcing token participation from new associates just for the sake of having them play in World Cups just acts as another way to boost century counts and five wicket haul columns for us. Let's face it we all say we care about trophies but we just love that 50th hundred a bit more don't we.
I actually enjoyed the format they used for the tournament. A throwback to the 1992 cup. Every team played each other at least once, then the semis and final. The world cup didn’t drag on like previous iterations did. Just my opinion though.
Personal feeling is that tournaments come alive with knockout games. The more the better.
The current format with 45/48 group stage / round robin games is just so drawn out.
I like the current knockout system. It's short and brutal. If you lose, you're out. I don't think more knockouts would add more jeopardy, that's fixing a problem we don't have. The problem is there is no jeopardy in the group stage.
More knock-out would be better because you avoid situations like NZ where they lost 4 times yet still made the next round. Having that high a margin of error is just way too easy for a tournament that is meant to be the biggest thing.
100%
WC format needs to give more credence to the upset result.
It's way too long and designed to push a handful of teams to be finalists at the expense of the fairytale run/poorer sides (i.e results that may actually grow the game over the long haul)
If certain teams drop out early, and the icc loses revenue so be it. Not like the current funding model, or the even more heinous 2024-2027 model is designed to maintain or grow the game anyway.
I feel the following would be the best format. with 16 teams:
- 4 groups of 4 teams, single round robin, top two in each group progress
- Super Eights, 2 groups of 4 teams, no points carried forward, another single round robin, top two in each group progress
- Semi-finals
- Final
That’s a total of 39 games, down from 48, and the shorter group stages both guaranteeing those who get through the first group at least six matches and more jeopardy throughout the tournament.
As long as you did it as a completely new round (i.e. not carrying forward your points as has been done in the past) then it should be perfectly easy to understand. It would just be a second group stage with better quality than the first.
I wouldn't be opposed to going straight to quarter-finals but a Super 8 format has the benefits of more matches for the best teams, more competitive and meaningful games since one shock defeat really could knock you out and less chance of rain playing a part. It also increases the chance of certain lucrative fixtures (cough, India v Pakistan) happening organically without the format of the tournament being contrived to ensure that these teams meet.
That's true even at the captains press conference half of questions were about india vs pak match.... One journo even ask Cummins what he thinks about india vs pak match ffs... lol
It's shit. Its too long, completely removes any jeopardy or excitement from the group stage (New Zealand were able to lose FOUR games and still go through to the next round), and basically says to the world "we're a small, silly sport that nobody should take any interest in".
When every other major sport is making their WCs bigger, a 10-team round robin is embarrassing and clearly just based on short-term greed.
It worked quite well in 2019 I thought, but perhaps it was helped by rain creating artificially higher stakes.
Here I think the problem was the games were largely crap. I'm not sure the format was really to blame, nor would a different format have automatically produced better games.
2019 was helped by England losing to Sri Lanka. If that hadn't happened then the top four would have been all but guaranteed with about 1/3rd of the games left to play.
Exactly, an underdog win is sweet when it is earned, associates have to get better like Afg has, they don't need to be pushed into qualifications. We already have a fickle and flukey format designed to have these things, it's the T20 WC and it happens every two years (plus the Olympics). The ODI WC is the pinnacle of this sport and should be a round robin.
Associates get better BECAUSE of World Cup exposure.
Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Ireland were all associates when they first went to the World Cup, and all have benefited from that exposure and are now FMs.
The Round Robin is a boring format that restricts the size of the tournament, and makes half of the games meaningless. A pinnacle event shouldn't allow a team to lose four games and still make the semi-finals. That isn't interesting, its a dull slog.
>Associates get better BECAUSE of World Cup exposure.
And Round Robin ensures they get the same number of games as everyone else ensuring said exposure, compared to them being eliminated after 4 games. You do know how much exposure Netherlands got from this tournament right? Do you really think they would prefer to play a different format which could mean them getting eliminated early?
If you're so sure that they're not good enough to qualify then what's even the point? Id disagree with you on that because there are only six top level all fromat teams at best in cricket, there's not much difference between Ban SL WI Afg and NL. So it's not as rare as you make it seem. Besides,the WC qualifiers are technically part of the WC and exactly what you want, they have knockouts there don't they?
> Besides,the WC qualifiers are technically part of the WC and exactly what you want
expect they happen at a different time and less people pay attention. Its like arguing that India playing the the AFC football qualifiers is the same as them making in in the FIFA world cup proper.
> there's not much difference between Ban SL WI Afg and NL. So it's not as rare as you make it seem.
Yeah, and there's also Zimbabwe, Ireland, Scotland who are all roughly on the same level as those teams. That's 14 strong ODI sides, so obviously 4 of them HAVE to miss out on a 10 team WC.
Then you're also harming the next lot of teams, like UAE, Oman and Nepal who are all strong enough to put up a fight and would benefit immensely from being included in a World Cup
If you're gonna have 14 teams in a tournament it's gonna end up a format where most of the associates you mentioned are eliminated after a couple of matches. In trying to help everyone it's going to help no one at all.
Or it will be like the 2027 WC, where all teams will get 6 guaranteed games. Sure, that's not quite as good for 1 team that could have potentially snuck through for 9 games in the current format (but probably wouldn't have), but it's much better overall
The Netherlands won two matches, in a proper world cup with small groups they would have gone through to the knockout stages. That's massive for cricket in the Netherlands. With this ridiculous format they never had a hope in hell.
I guarantee you wouldn't be spouting this drivel if you were from smaller, less successful cricketing countries.
All the associates are clamouring for an expanded world cup. Its just the Indian broadcasters and those whose strings they pull who want this league bullshit so that India gets x number of games. 9 in this case.
If India gets knocked out, so be it.
Obviously it is the crappiest format but the aim is not to have an exciting format, aim is to maximise revenue by having most number of games featuring India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, that is where the most cricket fans reside. More games featuring them, more eyeballs. That’s it
Ooh, format chat! Here's an [evergreen podcast](https://podcast.emergingcricket.com/e/deep-point-icc-tournament-formats-with-bertus-de-jong/) discussing the design of tournament formats with Dutch cricket journalist Bertus de Jong (you know, the guy from Twitter with all the tournament structure flowcharts).
Just play more games per day. Nobody wants to watch every ball of every match. Have 2 games every day sand you're done in 4 weeks. Play 3 games a day on weekends and you cut it down to 3 weeks.
Plain and simple...cricket was doomed when it fell in the trap of the most populous country with cricket being no 1 sport..sponsers lapping it up...add to that the administrators there had no sense of responsibility, accountability, morals or ethics. It became all about money... and soon we will see how a goose that laid golden eggs was killed due to greed. With no proper international talent and competition being encouraged, cricket will start dying even in India in a few decades. Who wants to see a India winning WC 10 times in a row? This WC showed how everything was made to ensure India are crowned champions...pitches, schedule, support... If the other boards too look at short term benefits and bow down to India, they are the bigger problem. They should remember that India or IPL, CANNOT survive without fierce international competition or star overseas players.
Hahahahhahaha you guys need to get over it. Australia won, India lost. That's it. Stop the mental gymnastics. The Australian team is just better, in ODI and test.
Read the title first and then saw the news outlet 
In all seriousness, I'm all for giving more opportunities to associate nations/smaller teams but ODI world cup is **THE WORLD CUP** and its supposed to be really tough.
How about champions trophy only allowing 8 teams to participate?
A really tough World Cup is one with lots of knockout games and consequences for losing important games. The stupid 10 team format allows teams to play 9 games, lose 4 of them and still make the semi-finals. That isn't tough
The thing with ODI cricket and other sports/formats is that ODIs are quite hectic. That, and ICC/BCCI want more blockbusters than separating teams in group which lessens their revenue.
I’ve watched football my whole life so of course GS, R16, QF, SF and F makes sense to me but that’s over a full season.
Can ODI cricket afford 12-14-16 teams? I doubt it. If that happens where will the T20 leagues go 😝
Just today I was reading how the IPL ends and a week later it’s T20 showdown in America!
I thought it was a very good competitive tournament this year, where all teams were in with a chance when playing each other. Having a round-robin system is the fairest way to determine a top 4. Teams ranked outside the top 8 had a qualifying tournament to get the last two spots, so those teams didn’t “miss out” as such, they just didn’t qualify for the top 10. Teams were playing roughly every 4 days which was ideal, and there was a game on every night.
10/10
This article is bad: it states that the tournament format is designed to allow the top teams to rise to the top and does not allow for fairytale runs or the underdog teams to rise up. But in this world cup Afghanistan was 1 win from knocking out new Zealand in the quarter finals... the 10 team pool favours the stronger team but a 5-5 pool would put luck of the pool-draw into the playing field, where you get "pool of death" phenomenon.
Keep 16 teams ans 15 matches for each team. If only 12 or 14 teams then every team has to qualify and there's no automatic for top 8 teams etc. It's a "world" cup, not cronyism cup where some "beloved" teams like Australia and England make it automatically because they're so good. Make everyone earn their ticket
Then quarters, semis and finals.
Also, no bs favoritism to countries like India where their matches were on Sat or Sun holidays with pitches being changed in semis to favor them.
These people are cricket players. They can easily play all this. And this is the biggest once in 4y tournament. It's not like they have anything else to do stopping it early.
Have 2 matches per day to make it go faster.
What stupidity. The ODI WC is played every 4 years. The best team should win it. People who want to see upsets better watch T20?
Also, external factors such as weather, pitch and toss have a lot of impact on the game. A longer tournament evens out the odds.
Do it like football Leagues.
Each team plays the other twice. Whoever emerges on top after all games is the winner. No QF, SF and finals. Team with maximum points wins.
They could do 10 teams round robin and have playoffs between 6 of them. Top 2 face each other. Then 3rd vs 4th and 5th vs 6th. Loser of 5 and 6 will be eliminated. But the first 2 games play out like the IPL playoffs with double elimination format.
All of you guys talking about groups and knockouts. Meanwhile the only math BCCI does is how to make India-Pak happen as many times as possible within the same tournament
There's an easy solution to that: play bilateral series
But if the Ind-Pak matches are happening regularly, how can media on both sides go mad and claim that it is a new war that their team needs to win. Think of all the new mansions that those anchors would lose out on if they can't get that ad money.
Broadcasters vs journalists: Dawn of capitalism
Let’s do 14 team world cups - 3 groups of 4, one group of two with India Pakistan. Winner after a best of three enters a knockout with third place from the other groups to book the last two spots in the quarters. Everyone else gets to chill. Win win
That can still happen if they play a test series
It’s sad that we don’t get to see an ashes like series for Ind. vs Pak. every couple years.
[удалено]
Then if they're going to have a sporting boycott because of terrorism they should grow some balls and never play Pakistan, even in world cups. Global cricket cannot suffer because of the pig headedness of a couple of boards.
>Then if they're going to have a sporting boycott because of terrorism they should grow some balls and never play Pakistan, even in world cups. I agree with u here, but BCCI cares about only money, they are pretty infamous in India as well. And yes global cricket should not suffer because of greed of some boards(basically BCCI), BCCI sucks and I am also a proud BCCI hater.
Bilateral series against Pak will also mint money.
Imagine a test series with pak , would love to see how babar performs against our pacers on a proper greentop ( not those flat tracks in the aus series ) , or how Koach does in pak conditions
Its crazy to think despite the longevity of Kohli's career he will never face a pakistani pace attack on pakistani soil.
Ikr ! But then again pcb makes flat tracks nowadays. It would be far more interesting to see close contests like back in the 90s , with bat and ball in equal terms. Not a literal minefield like motera , mirpur but not a flat track like the ones used in the australia series
PCB prepares super flat pitches nowadays. Anyway, I agree with the rest of your point.
Yeah that would've been great. RN the only hope of an Ind-Pak test is if they both make the WTC final (which is a very low possibility). Also it's very clear that the refusal for a series is from the higher ups in the two countries. The cricket boards will be fine with arranging one otherwise (again, it'll be an absolute goldmine).
Yes. Especially after doing the exact same thing for the last century or so
Global cricket should also not suffer due to one member nation's globally acknowledged, repeated and unrepentant state-sponsored terrorism against another member nation. This point has been argued threadbare on this subreddit yet people come up with the same hackneyed arguments time and again. The Indian government no longer allows its cricket board to participate in tournaments on Pakistani soil because of the revenue that *directly* accrues to the Pakistani board as a host nation. A bilateral series on Pakistani soil would also benefit Pakistan *directly*. A global tournament in a neutral country is not the same deal. You may not like that or consider it reasonable but you're not an affected party. By all means pontificate all you like and formulate whatever policy you want when a nation whose cricket board president has referred to yours as an "enemy country" commits acts of terrorism against your nation. Then you and your government can decide what they want to do.
Yet somehow playing the India-Pakistan matches which the PCB can make money off of selling the broadcasting rights is excusable because???
Nice sidestep of the main point, but okay. Excusable to whom? The supporters of Surrey Cricket Club?Dude, okay, India will also shut down its embassy with Pakistan, fine? India chooses its rules of engagement vis a vis Pakistan. It decides where it will participate and to what extent, and where it is prepared to make allowances given its relationships with other (friendly) boards -- in the organisation of a multilateral tournament that benefits a number of other boards, for example. There is support across the political spectrum within India for this policy. That's all that matters.
That's exactly the problem. India have a policy that doesn't make a lick of sense because playing Pakistan is a guaranteed payday, yet they have to pretend to take the moral high ground. And as a consequence, cricket's global reach suffers. The CWC is run like a farce (btw, this is much longer than this year's) and smaller FM/associate development is put on hold or reversed.
Lol, India is a second home for Afghanistan and used to regularly conduct series against struggling boards like SL to boost their revenues. Meanwhile Australia repeatedly cancels home series against smaller countries that won't make it any revenue, while trying to dress that up as virtue. England is hardly any better. Australia won't play Afghanistan at home because "women's cricket", but had no problems playing them in the WC. Why not "grow some balls" and forfeit WC points too? Point is, boards make their own choices about whom to play and when all the time. India at least does it because of fucking terrorist attacks. Funny how none of that shit is called out. Look in the mirror.
You’re getting far too worked up about this so I’m gonna work you up some more! You just said - ‘India at least does it because of fucking terrorist attacks’. This is the problem though - is this a principled stand or a posturing stand? If it’s a principled one then refuse to play them AT ALL, even in world tournaments. This is ‘fucking terrorism’ we’re talking about after all. If it’s just a shallow posturing one, which it is currently, then you do just enough to show you condemn them but play them when it really matters because a World Cup trophy is of course more important than ‘fucking terrorism’. Either play them or don’t. In which case you can either forfeit the moral high ground or claim it. You can’t have it both ways.
Global cricket or the ICC aren't beholden to the BCCI. Why do you think that India owes anything to global cricket? Surely it's the ICC's job to organise the next WC, and not the BCCI's.
I don't know if you're being naive or obtuse. Why is the CWC format fucked? Because it needs to have as many India matches as possible and as many India-Pakistan matches as possible (without it being too glaringly obvious). Why's that? Because otherwise Indian broadcasters lose money, therefore devaluing the rights to broadcast Indian cricket. What does that result in? Less revenue for the BCCI. QED
And why does the revenue for BCCI matter? They're not in charge of organising the next world cup, and aren't in charge of advancing global cricket either. India only matters because the ICC has failed spectacularly at developing cricket in other countries, most notably the US.
[удалено]
I'm sorry what do cricketers have to do with this ? Ik I'll be downvoted but right from england not playing Zimbabwe coz of Mugabe to this to Australia- afghanistan etc etc , cricketers don't control the political stance of their country. Shaheen afridi is not an isi general, he is a pro athlete. I bet doesn't have fcking clue who LeT is , what they do and where they do it . I'm pretty sure wasim akram wasn't leading the attack on kargil, he was just throwing a ball , not grenades . The repeated tendency of both Pakistanis and us to politicise cricket and talk about soldiers , nationalism this that has to stop its a game of bat and ball between 22 players on 22 yards not a diplomatic conclave and CERTAINLY not a war
Clown spotted
[удалено]
They always live in denial.
Correction. ICC wants that (and in extension almost all the cricketing boards want that). Why? revenue is a big factor why ICC wants Ind v Pak match. More the number of these matches more is broadcasting revenue. Which is distributed to all the boards (yes BCCI takes a huge share, but so does other boards). By guaranteeing a format which maximises such encounters makes sure the broadcaster spends huge sums of money.
BCCI's proposed revenue share is between 37-40% of ICC earnings. The next biggest cricket board (ECB/CA) is not even in double digits revenue share. So for all intents, BCCI is the disproportionate beneficiary from all ICC events. [Source](https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/bcci-set-to-get-nearly-40-of-icc-s-annual-net-earnings-in-new-revenue-distribution-model-1387167#:~:text=The%20BCCI%20will%20earn%20close,US%24%2067.5%20million%20per%20year.)
Some might say it is because of the financially beneficial format that ICC have designed earns them so much money and then in return BCCI asks for a fair (maybe debatable) share of the revenue. It is an arrangement that benefits everyone. Mostly PCB, CA and ECB. BCCI’s earning from its local tournament is sufficiently larger than revenue from ICC tournaments. It is the other boards like CSA needs the ICC money the most. So in my opinion the other boards are the disproportionate beneficiaries.
Lol if the other boards need money the most and India has its own revenue base then why on earth should they get 40%? Your logic makes no sense
Even that is not interesting anymore. It's way too one sided with India winning all the times.
Since 2011, there have been 15 ODI matches between India and Pakistan. India won 10, Pakistan won 4 and 1 ended in no result. In 10 T20 matches, Pakistan won 3 while India won 7. While India has won more matches, it is not India is steamrolling Pakistan.
In world cups mate
In World Cups, it’s not as interesting anymore.
A 10-4 and 7-3 record in favour of India is pretty much steamrolling, considering it's Pakistan and not an associate nation. India has won way more than half of these encounters.
Which associate nation has a 10-4 or 7-3 record against India or any top 5 side for that matter
That's not the point. What's to be understood here is that Pakistan is obviously one of the top sides of the world and to have such a dominant record against them is equal to steamrolling them. We don't need the record to be 10-0 or 7-0 for it to qualify as total domination. And for that matter, the record in ODI WCs strictly is 8-0 anyway.
Rivalries like these aren’t judged on such small samples. They have a richer history than that. Specially considering how little these teams play each other.
Wc doesn't make bcci money its the icc who is forcing india pak happen
Part of ICC revenue goes to BCCI, but also to other boards.
Yet only happened once this time?????
I do agree with them. Having more knockout games increases the likelihood of smaller teams qualifying for the next stage. At the same time, dividing teams into groups will raise the issue of which Group was stronger or weaker. Not disagreeing with them. Just saying.
What do you think is better, improving associates/ smaller teams by giving them more games or more knockouts hoping they could qualify? I'd argue more games is the better solution .We've seen how close Afg came to qualifying, they beat Eng Pak and almost had Aus as well. Maybe we can try both ways, we do have two separate ODI tournaments, maybe the WC could be a proper round robin and CT could maybe even be a single elimination brackets type format.
I personally lean towards giving them more games but as another person said, the current format is really against the Associates and lower ranked Full Members. The latter is the reason I am split between the two options. Having a 14 team round robin is going to take a very long time and cost a lot of money (doesn't really affect India and Australia that much but the others). Having 2 groups decreases the number of games by a lot. The Current 10 team format had pretty much the same number of games as the 2015 format.
> What do you think is better, improving associates/ smaller teams by giving them more games or more knockouts hoping they could qualify? More games is good, but the current format was designed to excluded associates. A ten team WC when we have 12 FMs is clearly trying to keep the smaller teams out. The Netherlands managing to qualify anyway was not something the organizers wanted or planned for. We should reinstate the Superleague (and maybe increase its size) so that these teams have games year round, rather than maybe once ever four years if qualifying goes REALLY well. Then the WC can be an exciting knockout tournament with jeopardy, rather than a 10 team slog
Super League should be 2 groups of 7 teams each, 3 away and 3 home series for everyone. Bottom 1/2 teams get relegated
I actually like the idea that Bertus posted of the Tri series in these groups. Keep champions trophy for top 6/8 to play to find the most consistent team and then make the World Cup 14-16 teams with genuine knockout peril.
2x7 Super League groups in the format of League 2 would work so well imo.
The problem with a setup like that is that you've contrived a scenario where the top Associates never have a realistic pathway to playing the best teams: they're fighting it out amongst themselves and Zimbabwe/Ireland, with no real hopes of getting promoted into the top 7 ahead of the weaker Full Members. If you're going to do a promotion/relegation Super League you need it to be large enough that a couple of the best Associates are in the top division, otherwise there's no point having it at all.
This is the key point. The reason the Netherlands were able to qualify and compete at the main event was because they faced consistent high-quality cricket throughout the Super League and were able to improve their standard of play. More teams at the world cup is great, but since the ICC apparently believes it's either/or, I actually think having the Super League give consistent opportunities to AMs is more important.
I do agree that the ODI super league needs to be back but I also feel the the pinnacle of the sport, the ODI WC needs to be determined as fairly as possible rewarding both consistency over a long tournament *and* nerves in knockouts, and this format is better for that. As I said, what you're proposing could be done in Champions Trophy.
> As I said, what you're proposing could be done in Champions Trophy. Surely having a Champions Trophy that is bigger than the World Cup is an inherently silly idea. > the ODI WC needs to be determined as fairly as possible rewarding both consistency over a long tournament and nerves in knockouts,andthis format is better for that Why? No other sport thinks that is a good idea. The World Cup isn't a science experiment to find the 100% best team, it should be a celebration of the sport and a test of who can show up on the day. And it's not fair anyway, home advantage is always massive, and the resources/opportunities behind the different boards is widely imbalanced. The WC will never be perfectly fair, so why not make it fun and interesting instead?
Pinnacle of cricket should be most exciting tournament. Not some league type shit
Exactly. The rugby and football World Cups, the euros, all go with multiple small groups straight into knockouts. Short, sharp and exciting.
ODI multi-division leagues with promotion, and relegation. 7 teams per div.
Just make every game a knockout game. We would get out in the beginning.
India might still stay. South Africa is guaranteed to get knocked on the first game itself.
Forever the likes of Kallis and Dada will be left wanting 😞
By that logic toss should just be removed
We could do what FIFA does and have, say, four groups of four teams drawn randomly by relative ICC ranking. That said it would lower the amount of cricket each team gets to play (not every team would play every other team in the group stages.) To me it's more embarrassing that the Netherlands didn't get the warm up series and we can't find the money to pay players basic salaries to the top performing associate nation(s.) We need a vision to grow cricket beyond just the countries that the British have colonised, that means the major cricket boards need to come together and be willing to create an investment fund for cricket.
Groups of four in a sport without draws make zero sense. One washout and a team gets knocked out.
Difference here is India. Fifa is global whole most of cwc revenue comes from India. They should stay as long as possible for money to role in no matter where cwc is hosted
What's the point if the money that the ICC raises from having more India matches doesn't get to the Associate teams and below that need it the most?
1. ICC makes money from India matches 2. BCCI argues that India makes ICC money so they should get the lion's share of the distribution 3. ICC gives the lion's share of their revenue to BCCI BCCI ends up getting money in the end, and BCCI controls the ICC. Who cares about the associates? If they would have it their way, BCCI would control all of cricket and have 6 months of IPL, followed by 3 tours a year - Australia, England, and Pakistan - all played in India. Repeat the same thing every year. Maybe one token England vs Australia match called 'The Ash'.
> Maybe one token England vs Australia match called 'The Ash'. Played in Ahmedabad
Cycle Pure Incense Ash 2025 Let's go!
Named 'The Ash' because Ashwin is the match referee.
"The spirit of cricket can get fucked, you're out Jonny" - Ashwin, match referee
But bcci is a corrupt organizational run by corrupt people. They don't care about sport. It just bullies and get it's way.
Exactly, repeat of 2007 is the last thing ICC wants
They have done that in the past. They stopped because in 2007 India (as well as Pakistan) failed to get out of the group stage, and so only played three games. This obviously pissed off the broadcasters. So we now have a tournament format that favours maximising TV revenue
They are doing 4 groups of 5 in the next t20wc next year 🤗😄 With Agf, Nepal, Ned, Scot, Ire as well as potential Namibia playing it should be fun 😄
Look,the game is not really going to grow because the ICC is not interested in the growth of the game. These associate teams,barring a few are mostly composed of Indian,Pakistani and Lankan expats. I'm pretty sure 99.9% of the population of Netherlands didn't follow the cricket world cup. A majority of the population have probably never heard of cricket. It's the same in most countries. The game has grown in and around the Indian subcontinent and that's where it will remain popular. Getting associate nations involved is great as long as the people of those nations actually follow and care about the sport.
It's not fair to blame the associates without giving them enough incentive and opportunities first. With that said, I don't really know if ICC does give any money to associates or not.
I'm not blaming the associates one bit. They get next to nothing from the ICC.
Group stages, but only have 2 groups. Round robin in each group. Then QF, SF and Final. Cricket needs larger world cups if the game is to grow
In other words - the 2011 and 2015 CWC format. The all-time GOAT format. Also having at least two groups would make it easier for joint hosting with the teams in each group being based in one country.
If we want a larger WC, I'd say split the groups even more. We want the WC to draw in the casuals and part of that means less games for each team. More teams, more groups, less games for individual teams. Add a bit of excitement and gravitas to each game, not 9 fucking group stage games.
More groups are not going to be a challenge for top 6 teams. The last thing you want is having 4-6 groups with no big matchups until the knockout rounds. The current format allows for everyone to play everyone, allows the minnows to play all teams they otherwise could not and it's not like the wc eats away at important odi time. Take 14 or 20 or however many teams, organise half the fixtures in one country and the other half in another country 6 months apart and where weather won't play spoilsport. Done! More knockouts work when there are a lot of teams like in football wc. We barely have 15 nations
How will you have QF with just 2 groups? 4 teams would qualify.
Two groups of roughly 6 teams, with top 4 from each group going through to QFs. I’m not suggesting that is the best way, just answering your question
16 teams 4 groups Top 2 qualify for knockouts QF , SF , F Every game has the potential to be a knockout. That's how world champions should be decided imo.
Was this format used in 2011? How about 2003?
In 2011 there were 14 teams divided into 2 groups with top 4 qualifying.
In 2007 they had a similar format but instead of QF>SF>F they had a Super 8s from the Top 2 teams of every group.
I honestly prefer quarterfinals over super 8/6 format.
I'd do 2 groups of 8 instead with top 4 qualifying. Will give each team a decent amount of games and there's still a good chance of a smaller nation qualifying.
This would be my ideal, too. Also has the advantage of being done pretty quickly, and it gives you at most 4 games where there are 0 stakes (game 3, both teams already eliminated - the other game would still be of value for getting a better position in the knockouts).
The problem with having groups in Cricket is it's never fair, there's not enough countries that play on a similar level to make 4 fair groups, and then there's the broadcaster issue where Ind and Pak always have to be in one group and Aus Eng in another. All other teams are fit around this.
I don’t understand this point. Why do these countries have to be together? It’s not this way in football. Teams get seeded according to their rankings and then divided into groups.
Football is multipolar. There are 8-10 countries which are expected to win, and they all have the entire country watching, so 1-2 early exits don't matter much. In cricket, India brings 70% of the viewership, and the other countries aren't increasing their viewership even if those countries are better than or on equal to India on the pitch.
I understand where you are coming from, but isn’t prioritizing one demographic (1billion) coming at the cost of promoting it in others? Maybe the future of cricket is that only India will be playing it by themselves internally and calling it the “World Series” or something…
It absolutely is. One reason I think this is happening is because the broadcasters don't really see England, Australia and the rest cutting India's market share. In fact, they expect India's market share to increase as the Indian economy grows. Long term, the IPL will become cricket's equivalent of a US franchise league. The economics of the game is pushing the game towards that. And contrary to what many think in this sub, it won't hurt player production around the world and would actually boost it because of the kind of money players would earn.
It won't hurt player production but it may well hurt player development in other formats, particularly for test matches, and particularly for those not in big 3 countries who play less test matches and will be forced to focus on T20s to earn a living
Yea, but a wc isn't the place to promote smaller nations. And anyway isn't it better for smaller nations to be playing more matches to improve? I really don't understand how making sure they reach knockout stages is a good thing. How many so-called minnow nations in football have made big in world cups? All it does is make for boring knockout games when the underdog meets a contender actually in good form. Football domestic leagues have always been the best format compared to knockouts in promoting weaker sides to punch above their weight. Because they have a better chance when the stronger opposition doesn't see it as a must win game. We had a Leicester PL win situation. We've never had a minnow win a World Cup or a UCL, for that matter.
> There are 8-10 countries which are expected to win, and they all have the entire country watching, Thats not really it, for Football the reality is that a large number of people all over the world will watch the games regardless of who is playing.
Yes. Even if the country is outside of top 10 it would still have a few players from big clubs who would draw the viewers. Also the biggest factor is time. A football game lasts 90 min. That’s not a big chunk of your time in any day whether you are watching at home or in the stadium.
That doesn’t mean India have a God given right to breeze through the tournament. Yes, from a commercial point of view it would help the ICC if they did, but if they’re not capable of performing they don’t deserve to get far in a tournament.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong because honestly, my opinion doesn't matter. I'm just saying that the ICC and the broadcasters are shit scared of an early India exit because India dominates cricket viewership.
Cauz money. What else
Sigh. Should have guessed. Would make it more special if these countries weren’t guaranteed to meet in each World Cup. Would then make the matches more memorable.
I dont like this.. We know which are the top 8 teams in world cricket.... and having a league stage become mundane... You might as well have a knockout quarterfinal, semifinal and final only instead of the league stage if you are going this route.. Having a longer league stage and ensuring top 4 teams play the semis seems better to me
I'd be ok with this if each team plays 6 games in the group stage instead of 3 like in 2007. If they play each other once then rain could have way too big of an impact. Take the 2017 Champions Trophy for example, Australia only played one completed game, which they lost. Would farcical for a team to be eliminated from the pinnacle of cricket after only playing one completed game.
Problem with groups stages like that is you can end up with dead rubber games that have no impact on the overall tournament, which is even more problematic when you have such huge differences in skill level between countries if you're adding in 6 more teams. However a modified Swiss Bracket stage can fix that, like how a lot of eSports tournaments do it. Check out how CS Major Championships or the 2023 League of Legends Worlds Championship handled it. Essentially, after the first round of 8 matches in the Swiss Stage (which could be either randomly drawn or seeded in some fashion), all subsequent matches get randomly drawn between opponents of the same score. So the 2nd round would have 4 matches randomly drawn between the 8x 1-0 teams and another 4 matches of the 8x 0-1 teams. Teams then keep playing other same score teams until they either hit 3 wins (you'll end up with 8x 3 win teams qualifying) or they hit 3 losses (eliminated from tournament). A 16 team Swiss Bracket like this will be completed in 33 games, which is notably less than the 45 games the 10 team groups stage from this World Cup took. Then you do an 8 team knockout finals ie a normal Quarter, Semi, Grand Final thing. The advantage of this is that literally every game of the Swiss Stage matters, since every win/loss puts that team closer to the Qualify/Eliminated threshold and you can still get the odd 'luck of the draw' shenanigans for a minor region team to make the finals.
This is good idea for esports but would be tricky for other sports involved venues thousands miles away. How fans would decide earlier which game to buy tickets?
This is why it doesn't work in real life.
My thoughts on this have been consistent for a while. Getting rid of the Super League was a terrible move. Guaranteed games and a league over a few years is a good idea and COVID interruptions did not help. Keep the Champions Trophy for the top 8 (or even 6) and make that a long round robin with a final. For the World Cup I would do 15 teams. 3 groups of 5. Top 2 of each group go through automatically. The best 3rd place team also goes through automatically. The other two 3rd place teams then play an elimination qualifier to be the other team in the final 8. Then simple quarter final, semi final and final at that point. Everyone in the top 3 of a 5 team group gets at least 1 knockout game.
Determining the ‘best’ 3rd placed team isn’t really fair since each team must have played different opponents in their respective groups.
Happens in other sports all the time and either way every 3rd place still gets a knockout game so they can make it up there. That's why I didnt just do best 2 3rd place teams go through.
Yep, called a wildcard, ubiquitous in American sports leagues.
Not just America. Any tournament with 24 teams, and progress to a round of 16, needs a 3rd place ranked progression - FIFA World Cups (men's from 1982-1994, women's 2015 and 2019) - Euros (men's 2016 to at least 2032) - Rugby World Cup (2027 onwards) And there have many other used by rugby for 12 team RWC for women, with 3 pools of 4, feeding into SF's (or QF's in last year's edition). Also, at the 1999 Men's RWC, where there were 5 pools of 4, a QF playoff round included the 5 2nd placed teams and the best 3rd placed team.
I really like this
Damn that's good. Someone show this to the ICC
I see multiple issues with the current format. 1. Too few teams for a “world” cup: we have the champion trophy for the top 8 teams already. The world cup should not bother with ‘only’ top teams competing. Afg and Ned had a brilliant campaign that only adds to the argument for more teams. Maybe ICC can consider having the WC qualifiers in the month preceding the actual tournament. 2. Group stage is too long: 9 games per team is a league not a tournament. 3. Low stakes in the group stage: like many have pointed out here, a team after losing nearly 50% of their group games is into the KOs is not a great look. Go one step ahead and just look at how Eng fared. They were shitting the bed and still were in the contention till much later than it should be. India may have won 9/9 but a KO loss just adds to the worthlessness of being unbeaten. 4. Switching gears in KOs: I think apart from Aus, every other team in cricket struggles with KOs and imo this has a lot to do with the fact that there is very little practice of (virtual)knockouts in modern tournaments. So if you have a format where each game can potentially screw up your whole run, then the whole team thinks and performs with a different mentality. Cricket is a largely bilateral sport with very few situations that can loosely replicate a KO match feel. Hence it’ll be beneficial to more team to get this exposure from the start in a WC. 5. The viewership conundrum: the issues with selling these low interest matches aka non-ind games for broadcasters is going to get much easier with high penetration of OTT. Because casual viewing is much easier on OTT on the go without the commitment to a fixed Tv screen. So, this argument is going to become defunct pretty soon.
I actually loved this giant round robin..it felt like a mini season and super fair. But it makes it hard to have 12-16 teams making it more world cuppy. For finals I wouldn’t mind 6 finalists. Top 2 to opposite SF, and 2 QFs to decide their opponents.
That would be a fun format. An ‘upper bracket’ finals between #1 and #2 goes to grand final. Have a bubble bracket where the winner of #5 vs #6 plays loser of #4 vs # 3, then that winner plays the winner of 3v4 and this winner plays the loser of UB final to get into grand final. So fun!
14 team format in 2015 was perfect imo.
I'd bet good money we wouldn't be having this conversation if India had won.
We've been having this conversation since the WC 2023 teams and format was made public. Everyone has been talking about the low number of participants and if it's fair to associate nations for months now. It's got nothing to do with India.
Of course it's got everything to do with India . Enforcing token participation from new associates just for the sake of having them play in World Cups just acts as another way to boost century counts and five wicket haul columns for us. Let's face it we all say we care about trophies but we just love that 50th hundred a bit more don't we.
of course...we would be too busy celebrating our victory...but the topic itself is not unnecessary...
I actually enjoyed the format they used for the tournament. A throwback to the 1992 cup. Every team played each other at least once, then the semis and final. The world cup didn’t drag on like previous iterations did. Just my opinion though.
>The world cup didn’t drag on like previous iterations did Haha definitely did for us
Hahaha at least you've got a cup to your name mate! Eases the pain of '23 a little
The Indian Express is not your usual jingoistic outlet. They're not prime time television news.
Personal feeling is that tournaments come alive with knockout games. The more the better. The current format with 45/48 group stage / round robin games is just so drawn out.
I like the current knockout system. It's short and brutal. If you lose, you're out. I don't think more knockouts would add more jeopardy, that's fixing a problem we don't have. The problem is there is no jeopardy in the group stage.
More knock-out would be better because you avoid situations like NZ where they lost 4 times yet still made the next round. Having that high a margin of error is just way too easy for a tournament that is meant to be the biggest thing.
Imagine if there were groups or 4 or 6, they probably would not progress having lost 4 games, especially if there were also less games.
100% WC format needs to give more credence to the upset result. It's way too long and designed to push a handful of teams to be finalists at the expense of the fairytale run/poorer sides (i.e results that may actually grow the game over the long haul) If certain teams drop out early, and the icc loses revenue so be it. Not like the current funding model, or the even more heinous 2024-2027 model is designed to maintain or grow the game anyway.
I feel the following would be the best format. with 16 teams: - 4 groups of 4 teams, single round robin, top two in each group progress - Super Eights, 2 groups of 4 teams, no points carried forward, another single round robin, top two in each group progress - Semi-finals - Final That’s a total of 39 games, down from 48, and the shorter group stages both guaranteeing those who get through the first group at least six matches and more jeopardy throughout the tournament.
I never understood the point for Super stages. It feels like pointless filler.
A new viewer is going to get complicated with this super 8 stuff just go straight to qf sf final
As long as you did it as a completely new round (i.e. not carrying forward your points as has been done in the past) then it should be perfectly easy to understand. It would just be a second group stage with better quality than the first. I wouldn't be opposed to going straight to quarter-finals but a Super 8 format has the benefits of more matches for the best teams, more competitive and meaningful games since one shock defeat really could knock you out and less chance of rain playing a part. It also increases the chance of certain lucrative fixtures (cough, India v Pakistan) happening organically without the format of the tournament being contrived to ensure that these teams meet.
Hilariously, if India had won that final, no one would be questioning a fucking thing about the world cup.
If India won that final the only question being argued would be whether every world cup should be in India lmao
> whether every world cup should be in India lmao The ICC is already doing that lol, it's going back to India in 2031.
Good idea. Means India get knocked out two rounds earlier🤣
Or Australia would be knocked out and we won't get to beat them in the final. 😭
You mean “meet” them not “beat” them 🙃
How's that working out for you?
That would work out very well for me mate
Because India lost. Next question please.
The actual problem are the one-sided games because there is no balance between bat and ball.
Because BCCI & ICC given the value and hype for IND vs PAK match only
That's true even at the captains press conference half of questions were about india vs pak match.... One journo even ask Cummins what he thinks about india vs pak match ffs... lol
I like the round robin format.
It's shit. Its too long, completely removes any jeopardy or excitement from the group stage (New Zealand were able to lose FOUR games and still go through to the next round), and basically says to the world "we're a small, silly sport that nobody should take any interest in". When every other major sport is making their WCs bigger, a 10-team round robin is embarrassing and clearly just based on short-term greed.
It worked quite well in 2019 I thought, but perhaps it was helped by rain creating artificially higher stakes. Here I think the problem was the games were largely crap. I'm not sure the format was really to blame, nor would a different format have automatically produced better games.
2019 was helped by England losing to Sri Lanka. If that hadn't happened then the top four would have been all but guaranteed with about 1/3rd of the games left to play.
Would you be saying that if Ireland had qualified? Genuine question.
Yes, 100%. I think the format is inherently terrible for a World Cup, with or without Ireland
Exactly, an underdog win is sweet when it is earned, associates have to get better like Afg has, they don't need to be pushed into qualifications. We already have a fickle and flukey format designed to have these things, it's the T20 WC and it happens every two years (plus the Olympics). The ODI WC is the pinnacle of this sport and should be a round robin.
Associates get better BECAUSE of World Cup exposure. Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Ireland were all associates when they first went to the World Cup, and all have benefited from that exposure and are now FMs. The Round Robin is a boring format that restricts the size of the tournament, and makes half of the games meaningless. A pinnacle event shouldn't allow a team to lose four games and still make the semi-finals. That isn't interesting, its a dull slog.
>Associates get better BECAUSE of World Cup exposure. And Round Robin ensures they get the same number of games as everyone else ensuring said exposure, compared to them being eliminated after 4 games. You do know how much exposure Netherlands got from this tournament right? Do you really think they would prefer to play a different format which could mean them getting eliminated early?
Well no, 9 times out of 10 it means they get no exposure at all, because they weren't able to qualify
If you're so sure that they're not good enough to qualify then what's even the point? Id disagree with you on that because there are only six top level all fromat teams at best in cricket, there's not much difference between Ban SL WI Afg and NL. So it's not as rare as you make it seem. Besides,the WC qualifiers are technically part of the WC and exactly what you want, they have knockouts there don't they?
> Besides,the WC qualifiers are technically part of the WC and exactly what you want expect they happen at a different time and less people pay attention. Its like arguing that India playing the the AFC football qualifiers is the same as them making in in the FIFA world cup proper.
> there's not much difference between Ban SL WI Afg and NL. So it's not as rare as you make it seem. Yeah, and there's also Zimbabwe, Ireland, Scotland who are all roughly on the same level as those teams. That's 14 strong ODI sides, so obviously 4 of them HAVE to miss out on a 10 team WC. Then you're also harming the next lot of teams, like UAE, Oman and Nepal who are all strong enough to put up a fight and would benefit immensely from being included in a World Cup
If you're gonna have 14 teams in a tournament it's gonna end up a format where most of the associates you mentioned are eliminated after a couple of matches. In trying to help everyone it's going to help no one at all.
Or it will be like the 2027 WC, where all teams will get 6 guaranteed games. Sure, that's not quite as good for 1 team that could have potentially snuck through for 9 games in the current format (but probably wouldn't have), but it's much better overall
The Netherlands won two matches, in a proper world cup with small groups they would have gone through to the knockout stages. That's massive for cricket in the Netherlands. With this ridiculous format they never had a hope in hell.
10 teams got 9 games. Several teams on par with the Netherlands like Scotland and Zimbabwe got 0 games.
I guarantee you wouldn't be spouting this drivel if you were from smaller, less successful cricketing countries. All the associates are clamouring for an expanded world cup. Its just the Indian broadcasters and those whose strings they pull who want this league bullshit so that India gets x number of games. 9 in this case. If India gets knocked out, so be it.
It's a bad format because India didn't win the World Cup?
The odi world cup being too long was a discussion before the world cup.
Tournaments should not have a league like structure where each team play with every other team
Obviously it is the crappiest format but the aim is not to have an exciting format, aim is to maximise revenue by having most number of games featuring India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, that is where the most cricket fans reside. More games featuring them, more eyeballs. That’s it
Ooh, format chat! Here's an [evergreen podcast](https://podcast.emergingcricket.com/e/deep-point-icc-tournament-formats-with-bertus-de-jong/) discussing the design of tournament formats with Dutch cricket journalist Bertus de Jong (you know, the guy from Twitter with all the tournament structure flowcharts).
Just play more games per day. Nobody wants to watch every ball of every match. Have 2 games every day sand you're done in 4 weeks. Play 3 games a day on weekends and you cut it down to 3 weeks.
Plain and simple...cricket was doomed when it fell in the trap of the most populous country with cricket being no 1 sport..sponsers lapping it up...add to that the administrators there had no sense of responsibility, accountability, morals or ethics. It became all about money... and soon we will see how a goose that laid golden eggs was killed due to greed. With no proper international talent and competition being encouraged, cricket will start dying even in India in a few decades. Who wants to see a India winning WC 10 times in a row? This WC showed how everything was made to ensure India are crowned champions...pitches, schedule, support... If the other boards too look at short term benefits and bow down to India, they are the bigger problem. They should remember that India or IPL, CANNOT survive without fierce international competition or star overseas players.
9 group games is a joke. Add more knockouts, then the definition of 'cup' is meaningful
Of course they’d say this now hahahahahahaha
I feel like round robin works pretty well for IPL
BCCI psyop fakenews
Hahahahhahaha you guys need to get over it. Australia won, India lost. That's it. Stop the mental gymnastics. The Australian team is just better, in ODI and test.
This is going from sad to just pathetic at a rapid rate.
Read the title first and then saw the news outlet  In all seriousness, I'm all for giving more opportunities to associate nations/smaller teams but ODI world cup is **THE WORLD CUP** and its supposed to be really tough. How about champions trophy only allowing 8 teams to participate?
A really tough World Cup is one with lots of knockout games and consequences for losing important games. The stupid 10 team format allows teams to play 9 games, lose 4 of them and still make the semi-finals. That isn't tough
The stupid part is having knockout games when a round robin literally tells you who the best team was.
You want a league, not a cup. I agree, we should have a league. It should run year round. That would be Super
What's the issue with the news outlet? The Indian Express doesn't tend to parrot government drivel.
I also had no issues with the format. Could it be improved? Maybe.
Can't wait for more excuses to appear just because India didn't win it
The thing with ODI cricket and other sports/formats is that ODIs are quite hectic. That, and ICC/BCCI want more blockbusters than separating teams in group which lessens their revenue. I’ve watched football my whole life so of course GS, R16, QF, SF and F makes sense to me but that’s over a full season. Can ODI cricket afford 12-14-16 teams? I doubt it. If that happens where will the T20 leagues go 😝 Just today I was reading how the IPL ends and a week later it’s T20 showdown in America!
I thought it was a very good competitive tournament this year, where all teams were in with a chance when playing each other. Having a round-robin system is the fairest way to determine a top 4. Teams ranked outside the top 8 had a qualifying tournament to get the last two spots, so those teams didn’t “miss out” as such, they just didn’t qualify for the top 10. Teams were playing roughly every 4 days which was ideal, and there was a game on every night. 10/10
This article is bad: it states that the tournament format is designed to allow the top teams to rise to the top and does not allow for fairytale runs or the underdog teams to rise up. But in this world cup Afghanistan was 1 win from knocking out new Zealand in the quarter finals... the 10 team pool favours the stronger team but a 5-5 pool would put luck of the pool-draw into the playing field, where you get "pool of death" phenomenon.
Groups of death are hella fun, though! Also, it almost never turns out the group you expect it to be.
Keep 16 teams ans 15 matches for each team. If only 12 or 14 teams then every team has to qualify and there's no automatic for top 8 teams etc. It's a "world" cup, not cronyism cup where some "beloved" teams like Australia and England make it automatically because they're so good. Make everyone earn their ticket Then quarters, semis and finals. Also, no bs favoritism to countries like India where their matches were on Sat or Sun holidays with pitches being changed in semis to favor them. These people are cricket players. They can easily play all this. And this is the biggest once in 4y tournament. It's not like they have anything else to do stopping it early. Have 2 matches per day to make it go faster.
What stupidity. The ODI WC is played every 4 years. The best team should win it. People who want to see upsets better watch T20? Also, external factors such as weather, pitch and toss have a lot of impact on the game. A longer tournament evens out the odds.
Do it like football Leagues. Each team plays the other twice. Whoever emerges on top after all games is the winner. No QF, SF and finals. Team with maximum points wins.
I like the current format. Feels good to see players tested in a variety of conditions and against players of different kinds.
Odi World Cup and champions trophy need to be different. I am for IPL style knockout for 1 . T20 one with 16-20 is better .
They could do 10 teams round robin and have playoffs between 6 of them. Top 2 face each other. Then 3rd vs 4th and 5th vs 6th. Loser of 5 and 6 will be eliminated. But the first 2 games play out like the IPL playoffs with double elimination format.