Quality over quantity, please

This is the World Cup in everything but name.

Heading into today's first Champions Trophy semi-final between Australia and New Zealand in Mohali, it is impossible to avoid the realisation that the last two weeks of competition in India have been an overwhelming endorsement of the principle that quality, instead of quantity, invariably generates considerably more interest and excitement than a handful of hapless minnows fighting for survival among the big fish of the sporting world.

This fifth edition of what is generally seen as a World Cup warm-up has not been a major crowd-puller (except when India are playing, of course), but the global television audience has lapped up an event in which every match, from the last preliminary fixture between the West Indies and Sri Lanka, is a contest between teams capable of going all the way to lift the title.

Many of the matches have transpired to be one-sided affairs, and in fact there have been very few nail-biting finishes. Yet in every fixture, before a ball is bowled and often well into the match, there is the anticipation of a tense, hard-fought contest between quality, battle-hardened rivals.

Take last Friday's clash of South Africa and Pakistan for example. The match turned out to be a rout for South Africa, inspired by lethal fast bowling from Makhaya Ntini, while the Pakistanis were at their inconsistent best, dominating the early going before folding pathetically when it really mattered. The final result, victory for South Africa by 124 runs, suggested a no-contest on paper. Yet it was anything but.

Even if the diehard fans of one-day international cricket have not been able to savour the run-feasts that they were anticipating, the more helpful conditions for bowlers in several of the matches have made for much more intriguing duels, where the flat-track bullies have been exposed while the quality batsmen have come to the forefront. None of the 12 group matches could have been referred to as a foregone conclusion, while today's encounter, tomorrow's showdown between the West Indies and South Africa in Japiur, and then the final three days later, will all have those elements of anxiety and uncertainty.

The same cannot be said of the 24 group matches at next year's World Cup.

While the intention of the ICC in introducing more Associate Member nations to the big stage in the past decade is a praiseworthy one in the context of spreading the gospel, and therefore the revenue-earning potential, of the game, it does create a situation where a succession of virtual no-contests will be standard fare for the first 12 days of this event.

Scanning through the fixture list for the first round from March 13 to 25, it becomes clear that - on current form - only one of the six matches in each group is expected to be both competitive and worthy of interest among fans outside of the actual competing nations. In Group A, it's Australia versus South Africa; Group B, India against Sri Lanka (although Bangladesh may be a factor); Group C, England versus New Zealand; and Group D, West Indies against Pakistan in the World Cup opener (Zimbabwe may cause a few problems if they can get their act together in time).

No disrespect is intended to the hard-working teams from Kenya, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, the Netherlands and Bermuda, but they will be coming to these parts for the exposure, the experience, plenty licks and to be the victims of a few cheap World Cup records.

Yes, the Kenyans famously upset West Indies in the 1996 World Cup and reached the semi-finals of the last tournament in South Africa in 2003, but the former had much to do with complacency and an unsettled Caribbean team at the time, while the latter was due in no small measure to two of their preliminary group opponents preferring to forfeit the points after being scared-off from traveling to Nairobi to face the Kenyans because of alleged security concerns.

To have such a high proportion of no-hopers among 16 teams really devalues the event as a spectacle. It almost seems a case of putting on fixtures just to give the television networks - who have paid huge sums for exclusive rights - something to cover so that the World Cup can be a six-week marathon instead of the compact, high-quality, three-week festival of the best in international cricket that a tournament of this stature should be.

Comparisons will inevitably be made to the 32-nation football World Cup finals and the high proportion of teams there who really have no chance of lifting the prize. But football is a truly global sport, igniting extreme passions from fans in every country on the planet. Gone are the days when the newcomers would be the whipping boys of the favoured teams. In fact, at Germany 2006, the group phase was far more entertaining than the knockout stages because of the open, attacking football played by all the teams, big or small.

Cricket has been an exclusive club for too long for the same to prevail at its World Cup, which is why the Champions Trophy has been full of interest from ball one, while next year's Caribbean cricketing carnival will only heat up two weeks into the show at the "Super Eights" stage. In other words, when the same eight teams that were involved at the start of the Champions Trophy proper are left to fight it out for the game's biggest limited-over prize.