Please Don't Repeat This 10-team Fiasco In 2023

Adam Collins bemoans the current World Cup structure which has produced a lowkey round-robin end as well as denying minor nations an opportunity

- Adam Collins

Eleven dead rubbers. What a flaccid end to the group stage of this World Cup we have ahead of us if results go as expected over the next few days. But maybe it will take something this tedious to sharpen the minds of administrators – specifically, ICC board members – who allowed the format of this version (and the next) of the tournament to be willfully butchered.

Let’s go back before we go forward. Back to 2011. It was then, that for three months, it first became ICC policy to reduce the tournament from 14 to ten teams from 2015 onwards. Not only that, it was to be operated without a qualification tournament. Instead, the World Cup would become an invitational, only open to the then ten full member Test-playing nations. Sure enough, Australia and England and India were the biggest cheerleaders for the cull.

When Ireland, who a month earlier had beaten England in the World Cup, threatened to take the matter to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the idea was knocked on the head for four years. Between times, a qualification process was devised and the rest is history. Why? Because India were bounced out of an ill-conceived group stage in 2007 after three games and revenue took a pounding due to the fact that Indian games were no longer on television.

It may not feel like it, but this is all very relevant to what we’re heading towards next week. The lust for a smaller World Cup after that moment in time came after the competition expanded from 12 to 14 and eventually 16 teams by 2007.

The botched job in the latter event in the West Indies got greedy – specifically, in its want for a Super Eight stage – and it backfired.