The perfect template to ruin a sport
The post-tournament flack continues to fly three days after the end of the World Cup
Martin Williamson
25-Feb-2013
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The post-tournament flack continues to fly three days after the end of the World Cup. In The Times, Simon Barnes pulls no punches about the format and execution of the whole thing:
It had everything, mismatches, one-sided games, games that didn’t matter much, games that were simply short of action or drama or interest. International sporting organisations across the world are invited to study this event long and hard: it is the perfect template for the ruination of a sport.
How can sports administrators make such crass errors? Simple. They aren’t interested in sport. They are interested in power. The more countries you involve, the more power you have. The more money you make from a multi-nation tournament, the more power you have.
In The Daily Telegraph, Simon Hughes, reflecting on the farcical end to the final, writes that petty officialdom and the mindless obstructiveness of jobsworths has gone too far:
As a cricket-mad Hollywood light wrote in an email to me: "For those of us who love the game, it is beyond agonising to watch it systematically being ruined by small-minded, over-literal, bean-counting umpires and officials. It's entertainment, not a bankers' convention!!"
Exactly. As usual the people who really suffer are the paying public who are utterly disregarded in this pursuit of legal untouchability. So much for the 'Spirit of Cricket' preamble to the Laws of Cricket. Where's the 'spirit' in all of this?
In yesterday's Guardian, Gideon Haigh says that the current 50-over format has a limited shelf life and that the World Cup has paved the way for Twenty20.
Fans in the West Indies know their cricket; they do not sit there waiting for the next beach ball to bounce along or Mexican wave to wash over them. Maybe it was not only exorbitant ticket prices that kept them away. Maybe they saw this spectacle for what it was: a bunch of overcoached, overcooked lookalikes providing third-rate content for Rupert Murdoch. Perhaps the idea all along was to soften us up for the inexorable advance of Twenty20 cricket. It has never looked better.
Martin Williamson is executive editor of ESPNcricinfo and managing editor of ESPN Digital Media in Europe, the Middle East and Africa