It has been a while since I last posted anything on this due to a variety of reasons (travelling and what not), but I'm pretty sure my 3 regular readers (all of which are close family and friends) will manage to go about their business without being too disappointed. And there have been way too many mismatches for the odd bright spot to balance out what has otherwise been a tepid tournament so far. The fact remains that the best 8 teams in the world play only 12 of the 42 matches in the league stages. Most of the games between the big teams so far have been pretty exciting, which makes me look forward to the leaner and meaner 10-team event of 2015 with hope. I'm also prone to agree with an Indian website that suggested that the ICC has hired England to make the weaker teams look good. England are the type of hunter that took on a particularly ferocious lion and slayed it, came out of hand-to-hand combat with a grizzly bear with it's pride intact but then took a rather bad beating from an adolescent cub and a domesticated zebra. I'll save the debate of how the weaker cricket nations can be helped to a future point. Also, all the matches have been analyzed to death so I won't repeat that here. There are a couple of very interesting things to have come out of this world cup so far: the UDRS and the batting powerplay.
Now a lot of people realize that the Duckworth-Lewis is something that most people who aren't mathematicians won't understand all too well. Most people think of that as Forrest Gump's mama's proverbial box of chocolates: you open it and just accept whatever is inside it. The UDRS, however, is a completely different animal. On the surface, it's motive is simple enough: To eliminate as many errors from cricket as possible. However, keeping things simple is something the ICC (and lawyers) have traditionally struggled with (along with many other things including but not limited to getting things right and showing common sense). I'm pretty confident in their ability to bungling things up to an extent that they can probably make eating a bowl of cereal seem inhumanly difficult. Something I just haven't been able to grapple with is this whole system of appeals and 2.5 meter distances.
Now consider this alternative: The umpire makes a decision. In the time that the bowler walks back to his mark, the captain adjusts the field so the short third-man is 3 inches more to his right than before, the batsman adjusts his crotch and the camera-man focuses on his newly found true love in the stands, the third umpire does what he is presumably there for - takes a look at the decision and either upholds it (in which case no one notices), or overrules it (which would, admittedly, make everyone take notice). Now I'm pretty sure Darryl Harper would find ways to get even that wrong - he is the type of person I would not trust with using a coffee machine without being a serious threat to himself and those around him - but all in all, it would result in reducing the number of absolute howlers. Apart from making the whole system easier to understand than the Theory of Relativity. And let's face it - cricket is inherently a stop and start sport. And complaining about the few extra few seconds that this could potentially add is like complaining about a few extra drops in the ocean.
Secondly, the batting powerplay has thrown up an extremely interesting conundrum to all capains: when to take it? It is like a harmless looking Trojan horse that could end up housing an army of lethal soldiers who attack when you least expect it. Something that by conventional wisdom is an ally to the batting side has been anything but, on an average. Like Robin Jackman said on commentary during the India-SA match, it doesn't matter when you take it, you have to bat well in it. Batsmen who take it start acting like 16-year olds who are under immense pressure of "being cool" from their peers and end up sucking at the wrong end of their cigar resulting in long, fitful coughing while also burning their tongues and looking extremely foolish and positively uncool in the process. Maybe the trick is to not try and be cool, to not try and whack the cover off every ball, to not try and feel the pressure of hitting in the air all the time, but pressure can make you do funny things. I have a feeling it is decidedly easier for armchair critics like me to sit around and talk about it than actually using a batting PP well. But I may be wrong. The trick really is to keep a realistic target and not try and score 70 runs off every batting PP. Kamran Akmal, after all, cannot be the keeper in every match.
This also brings up another point: the temerity of modern-day captains. If the great explorers of the past were anything like any of the captains seen so far during the tournament, we would have thought the world is still flat, the English would have eaten their food without spices and ... well, you get the point. Zero sense of adventure. Why, after all, does it need a batting power-play for them to bring the field in and make the batsmen take some risks?Also, one boundary followed by three dot-balls is definitely better TV than four ambled singles in a row while the batsman, bowler and fielders are on auto-pilot.
So as things proceed towards the knockouts, the only thing to see really is whether Bangladesh are able to sneak in at the expense of England, and what the actual matchups are going to be like. Now this might be a bit of an oversimplification, but I get the feeling that the team that ends up conquering the batting powerplay might be the one that has the best chance of winning the trophy.
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