The so-called
International
Cricket World Cup
is finally over – a strange combination of drawn-out yawn, rip-off, farce, and sinister mystery.
The sinister mystery of course was the murder of Bob Woolmer, an event probably not directly caused by his team’s (Pakistan) premature exit from the tournament, or the impulsive fury of a disappointed fan, but the well-planned execution of a stringer who either was not playing along with agreed match-fixing arrangements or was about to blow the gaffe on the billion dollar industry. Everyone knows the one-day game is riddled with corruption, and every unexpected result, and even every unexpected episode – like two wickets in an over - is automatically suspect.
Bob Woolmer may have been a big man, but he was a midget in comparison to the godfathers of illegal cricket betting.
The on-going plodding efforts of the local police were derisory – the murderers would have been out of the country within an hour of the deed being done – creating a new simile in the English language – as useless as a Jamaican pathologist.
The drawn-out yawn was the two month long tournament itself – from 16 original teams, some of which could hardly hold a bat the right way up, we reduced to a mystifyingly named “Super 8” phase, the participants of which played every combination of each other and which therefore seemed to go on for ever. There was and is one cricketing superpower – Australia – just as there is a global political superpower – with all the other teams being also-rans, so there would never be any doubt of the result.
The rip-off was the huge expense of the proceedings for any fan wanting to attend – hanging around in the West Indies for two months is not the cheapest part of the world, not to mention the costs of flying around from island to island to follow your team, plus the ticket prices in the vast, newly built stadiums, which therefore remained largely empty and will stand as terrifying white elephants for the future of these small nations, whose arms were twisted to build them.
The farce was the siting of the tournament on tropical islands where it rains all the time, and came fittingly to a head in the final on Saturday, which limped along on an on-off basis due to the weather, was shortened, and ended twice – in the almost total darkness! Don’t we have weather forecasts these days? If on/off rain was predicted for the whole day, why not postpone the whole event until Sunday? Do teams spend several years in properation for the final, only to be fobbed off with a truncated parody of a match, because of rainy weather? Since everyone had been waiting two months, another day would not have made much difference.
All of this is based on One Day International cricket, a pantomime version of the ancient game, where the players wear neck to toe coloured pyjamas (some of which must be excruciating in the heat) and play a game which has the most Byzantine arcane rules of any sport, including the so-called Duckworth-Lewis rules, where one needs a laptop and statistics degree to decide who won! And not even then, because officialdom in the final match could apparently not fix on the winning figure, leaving the losing team (Sri Lanka, the winning one being of course Australia) to battle on literally in the dark. Imagine a football cup final whose length could be reduced to a 15-minute play each way at the whim of the referee, or a match decided by 1.35 goals!
Oh yes, and as another part of the farce, we have the 'umpires', relics of an earlier gentlemanly era, mostly elderly portly figures with acute visual and hearing impairment, who made decisions, chiefly on leg-before-wicket and catches at the wicket, seemingly at random. Where do they get them? We could only hope that the number of batsmen given out when they were obviously not, were approximately equal to the converse case, and so cancelled out. If not due to incompetence, the inevitable suspicion, for every incomprehensible verdict, is of course match fixing again.
We have the (awesome) computer graphics technology to make decisions of hair-fine accuracy now, so for heavens sake use it, and relegate the human ‘umpires’ to field supervisors, holding bowlers’ glasses and setting up the stumps etc.
So next time please, shorter and simpler.
International
Cricket World Cup
is finally over – a strange combination of drawn-out yawn, rip-off, farce, and sinister mystery.
The sinister mystery of course was the murder of Bob Woolmer, an event probably not directly caused by his team’s (Pakistan) premature exit from the tournament, or the impulsive fury of a disappointed fan, but the well-planned execution of a stringer who either was not playing along with agreed match-fixing arrangements or was about to blow the gaffe on the billion dollar industry. Everyone knows the one-day game is riddled with corruption, and every unexpected result, and even every unexpected episode – like two wickets in an over - is automatically suspect.
Bob Woolmer may have been a big man, but he was a midget in comparison to the godfathers of illegal cricket betting.
The on-going plodding efforts of the local police were derisory – the murderers would have been out of the country within an hour of the deed being done – creating a new simile in the English language – as useless as a Jamaican pathologist.
The drawn-out yawn was the two month long tournament itself – from 16 original teams, some of which could hardly hold a bat the right way up, we reduced to a mystifyingly named “Super 8” phase, the participants of which played every combination of each other and which therefore seemed to go on for ever. There was and is one cricketing superpower – Australia – just as there is a global political superpower – with all the other teams being also-rans, so there would never be any doubt of the result.
The rip-off was the huge expense of the proceedings for any fan wanting to attend – hanging around in the West Indies for two months is not the cheapest part of the world, not to mention the costs of flying around from island to island to follow your team, plus the ticket prices in the vast, newly built stadiums, which therefore remained largely empty and will stand as terrifying white elephants for the future of these small nations, whose arms were twisted to build them.
The farce was the siting of the tournament on tropical islands where it rains all the time, and came fittingly to a head in the final on Saturday, which limped along on an on-off basis due to the weather, was shortened, and ended twice – in the almost total darkness! Don’t we have weather forecasts these days? If on/off rain was predicted for the whole day, why not postpone the whole event until Sunday? Do teams spend several years in properation for the final, only to be fobbed off with a truncated parody of a match, because of rainy weather? Since everyone had been waiting two months, another day would not have made much difference.
All of this is based on One Day International cricket, a pantomime version of the ancient game, where the players wear neck to toe coloured pyjamas (some of which must be excruciating in the heat) and play a game which has the most Byzantine arcane rules of any sport, including the so-called Duckworth-Lewis rules, where one needs a laptop and statistics degree to decide who won! And not even then, because officialdom in the final match could apparently not fix on the winning figure, leaving the losing team (Sri Lanka, the winning one being of course Australia) to battle on literally in the dark. Imagine a football cup final whose length could be reduced to a 15-minute play each way at the whim of the referee, or a match decided by 1.35 goals!
Oh yes, and as another part of the farce, we have the 'umpires', relics of an earlier gentlemanly era, mostly elderly portly figures with acute visual and hearing impairment, who made decisions, chiefly on leg-before-wicket and catches at the wicket, seemingly at random. Where do they get them? We could only hope that the number of batsmen given out when they were obviously not, were approximately equal to the converse case, and so cancelled out. If not due to incompetence, the inevitable suspicion, for every incomprehensible verdict, is of course match fixing again.
We have the (awesome) computer graphics technology to make decisions of hair-fine accuracy now, so for heavens sake use it, and relegate the human ‘umpires’ to field supervisors, holding bowlers’ glasses and setting up the stumps etc.
So next time please, shorter and simpler.
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