January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Comment
Plenty of highlights but it was too long
The highest score in World Cup history for India.
Ricky Ponting's Australia claiming their third title to move alongside Brazil in the annals of sport's greatest ever teams.
Ireland's amazing St. Patrick's Day victory over Pakistan and the grisly unsolved murder of coach Bob Woolmer, which continues to cast a dark shadow over the sport.
Those are just the headlines of a World Cup that has been packed with incident. So why is it now being written up as one big non-event?
The truth is, it has gone on too long. It's hard to believe that the tournament which concluded in the muggy evening light in Barbados on Sunday was the same event Bermuda were competing in nearly two months ago.
This was the same Sri Lanka team that knocked our boys over for 78 on their World Cup debut, that Adam Gilchrist was pounding around the park on Sunday. The two games seem years apart, not part of the same tournament.
What's worse is that after more than seven weeks of cricket we couldn't even get a full 50-over final. Surely that was the least the tournament deserved.
No doubt some will point to the number of teams in the World Cup and the number of one-sided games and argue for a shorter more compact tournament, bumping the likes of Bermuda.
But the success of Ireland and Bangladesh invalidate that theory. And it was the super-eights were the tournament, which had been simmering nicely in the group stages, went off the boil.
The football World Cup has 32 countries and is over in a month. Surely the ICC can manage to squeeze a 16-team tournament into that space of time?
It might have helped, too, if the spirit of equity hadn't compelled the West Indies to spread the tournament over nine different countries.
Following Sri Lanka to the final would have taken you're average fan to Trinidad, Guyana, Antigua, Grenada, Jamaica and finally Barbados. No wonder the stands were half empty.
ICC Chief Exec Malcolm Speed finally admitted this week that the tournament was too long and suggested cutting it by ten days. Try a month.
The solution is simple. Go straight from the groups to a quarter-final knockout and hold it all in a maximum of three different countries.
We would have had the same semi-finals, the same final, and the same winner. The only difference would be it would have been over a month ago and we would have been talking about one of the more memorable World Cups, for good and bad reasons, rather than thanking God that it was finally over.
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