Out-of-date seedings paint false picture for tournament

Another tournament dogged by a majority of irrelevant games - that's on the cards for the International Cricket Council's Champions Trophy to be played in England from September 9-26 next year.

It is understood the format is set to be ratified at the Monaco meeting of the Board of ICC Development International Ltd (IDI) - the commercial element of the ICC.

Apart from the fact that seedings for the tournament are ridiculously based on the rankings at the launch of the ICC One-Day International Championship on October 31 last year, the same format that made the last tournament in Sri Lanka so forgettable is being employed for the England tournament.

In each of the four pools there will be only one relevant game, with two non-events being played out involving the tournament minnows, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Bangladesh and the Netherlands.

Based on the rankings the ICC have used, the tournament pools have been published by the Daily News in Sri Lanka and were (with rankings in brackets as at October 31, 2002 in brackets):

Pool A: Australia (1), New Zealand (8), Zimbabwe (9)
Pool B: South Africa (2), West Indies (7), Kenya (10)
Pool C: Sri Lanka (3), England (6), Bangladesh (11)
Pool D: Pakistan (4), India (5), the Netherlands

However, had the rankings been based even on the ratings at the moment the draw would have looked vastly different:

Pool A: Australia, England, Zimbabwe
Pool B: South Africa, New Zealand, Kenya
Pool C: Pakistan, West Indies, Bangladesh
Pool D: Sri Lanka, India, the Netherlands

In such a tournament in which only a few games are involved, surely there was merit in leaving the poolings until at least the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer next year.

All that was required was for the pool numbers to be put into the draw and on the cut-off date so that every team would know where it was going to play based on their ranking.

If nothing else, the decision to base the seedings on rankings that will be two years old by the time the tournament is played makes a mockery of the ICC's own One-Day Championship. This sort of tournament should be the very vehicle for which up-to-date rankings are utilised.

Not only does it match combinations at their level of performance at that time, it provides a natural match-up between teams of like ranking.