It feels like it was only the other night that co-hosts Mexico and South Africa kicked off the 23rd edition of the FIFA World Cup, and here we are with only two of the gargantuan 104 matches left to play in the tournament.
One of them, the third-place playoff, is a match no team wants to feature in. It is not even a necessary evil, a consolation prize that offers scant to no consolation. Just days after suffering heartbreaking losses to Spain and Argentina respectively, expecting France and England to put on a show is asking for a little too much. But such are the demands on modern professional sport that the show must go on, no matter that the protagonists believe it is nothing if not a formality.
Contrary to the popular perception that accompanied the expansion of the World Cup to 48 teams for the first time in its long and storied history, this edition has been anything but lop-sided, predictable and unidimensional.
The success of Cape Verde, more than anyone else, is a massive shot in the arm for the sport’s governing body, which had copped its fair share of criticism when it added 16 nations to the World Cup compared to the previous edition in what was seen largely as a self-appeasing, populist move. Till date, Cape Verde remain the only team not to have lost to Spain in this edition, a result Lionel Messi-fuelled Argentina will seek to reprise in Sunday’s final at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
Such has been the overwhelming success of the tournament that FIFA boss Gianni Infantino has thrown up the realistic prospect of an even larger field at the next edition in four years’ time. It will be jointly co-hosted by Spain, Portugal and Morocco with a game apiece in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the tournament, first held in Uruguay in 1930.
Just a month prior to this public pondering, Infantino had joked that the only way Italy, the country of his birth and four-time champions, could qualify was if the field was expanded to 64 teams, “or maybe even 208”. Obviously, that’s not why Infantino’s FIFA is mulling another expansion, though it isn’t lost on anyone that the Italian national side has hit a terrible roadblock after failing to make it to the World Cup for a third edition on the trot.
Even as the ‘Beautiful Game’ is considering various possibilities, FIFA’s cricketing counterpart, the International Cricket Council, announced an expanded field for the next 50-over World Cup, to be staged in 2027. At a time when the One-Day International version is battling for relevance and primacy, the constant change in formats is anything but ideal.
One would have thought the system in vogue for the last two editions — in England in 2019 and In India in 2023 where the 10 participating teams played each other once in a round-robin format with the top four making it to the semifinals — was fair and just because it pitted the strongest sides in the world against each other and offered insurance against a bad day in office or an unkind cut from the elements.
But apparently, those who are more invested in the sport and who are far more qualified to take such calls don’t feel so, which is why the 2028 edition will be a 14-team affair, as the ICC had indicated more than five years ago.
Bilateral 50-over contests no longer hold the same interest, attention or standing as they once used to, when T20 cricket was not even in the realms of the imagination. Limited-overs cricket was driven globally entirely by the ODI iteration and series of five, six or even seven matches weren’t uncommon. Now, even in the imminence of a World Cup, seldom do teams square off in a series of more than three games. It is perhaps in deference to a pronounced apathy from the fans to whom context has started to matter a lot more in the wake of the 20-over revolution that promises and delivers non-stop excitement, with the bonus of a decisive outcome guaranteed inside four hours (provided teams don’t mess around with the overrate).
A thing of the past
Just the other day, Shubman Gill reflected nostalgically on the tri-series showdowns that once dominated the ODI ecosystem. Every summer in Australia, the host nation would lock horns with two other sides over an extended period culminating in a best-of-three finals.
It did sometimes appear too inflated and long drawn-out, but there was so much prestige attached to those trilateral contests. Victory in the finals was often considered next only to clinching the World Cup or the Champions Trophy (instituted in 1998 as the ICC KnockOut Trophy).
Indeed, who can forget the ecstasy in India when M.S. Dhoni’s warriors swept the finals 2-0 in early 2008 in the immediacy of the Monkeygate scandal. The peerless Sachin Tendulkar was in the forefront of two amazing title clashes that justified Ricky Ponting’s prediction that the scoreline in the finals would be 2-0 — except that his team was on the wrong side of the result.
The duels in Sharjah are memorable, not least the one in April 1998 when India sneaked into the final ahead of New Zealand on run rate after Tendulkar’s magnificent Desert Storm that was more furious than even the sandstorm which first interrupted and then truncated the final league clash against Australia. And also when Tendulkar celebrated his 25th birthday in style with a second magnificent century in three nights to consign hitherto unbeaten Australia, the great Steve Waugh’s Australia, to a crushing defeat.
Now, there are hardly any triangular competitions. Even several bilateral series are played in front of empty stands, and potentially the only occasion when more than two countries play in the same tournament is during the Asia Cup, which switches between 50- and 20-over versions depending on the format in which the next World Cup is to be played.
Rise of the shortest format
Given the packed calendars, the profusion of T20 leagues worldwide and a marked slant towards cramming as many 20-over games as possible into a tight timeframe, the 50-over game has almost been cannibalised, depending largely — if not only — on the flagship World Cup to keep its head just above the swirling water.
How will this 14-team World Cup play out next year? Only time will tell, though this isn’t the first time the tournament will have this many teams. In any case, the ‘actual’ action will only begin from the second stage onwards, when 12 sides will be divided into two groups of six each.
The original plan, envisaged in June 2021, to have seven teams in each of the two pools, has been shelved. Rightly so, because of the fear of one-sided matches which will in turn impact both bums on the seats in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia – the joint hosts – and a larger television audience that drives and decides the market value of broadcast rights and sponsorship wars, among other things.
One set of pundits has argued that a World Cup, especially of the 50-over variety, must be a tight, compact competition involving only the cream so that the ‘sanctity’ of the event is maintained. They have dismissed Kenya’s conquest of the West Indies in 1996 or Ireland’s stunning defeat of England 15 years later as the occasional flash in the pan that does not justify the diluting of the field. They argue that as it is, the ICC ODI team rankings encompass only 20 teams, and to have 14 of them playing in a World Cup is a little much, even if only 12 will eventually be in the running for top honours with two teams being eliminated in the first triangular round.
They contend that if there is a perceived need, or even a case, to have more teams in a World Cup, it should be accommodated in the 20-over kind where 93 teams enjoy ICC rankings, from recently crowned No. 1s England to Costa Rica, who currently bring up the foot of the table.
While they might not be thrilled at the 50-over showpiece entity becoming numerically larger, they may be fine with 20 teams competing in the T20 World Cup for the third successive time.
In its bid to globalise the sport and spread its tentacles to hitherto untouched territories, the ICC chose to use T20s as the vehicle to catch the eye of those in, say, Japan and Italy, in Fiji and Brazil. That it has succeeded to a large extent in its stated desire to attract new nations to its fold is beyond question — at its Annual Conference in Edinburgh on Wednesday, the ICC officially inducted Mauritius as its 111th member nation.
The growing pull of the dramatic 20-over variant has resulted in the return of cricket to the Olympic fold at the 2028 summer Games in Los Angeles, a shot in the arm for a discipline that has been out of the quadrennial extravaganza since its only appearance at the Paris Games in 1900 when only two contestants, Great Britain and the hosts, battled for the gold medal.
While the 20-over game, with its unquestioned charm and magnetic tug, will lure many other countries to the ICC fold, it is hard to see its longer white-ball counterpart taking deep root in too many nations that are not already playing the sport. Against this backdrop, the debate on whether the 50-over World Cup should continue to mushroom numerically will rage on.
There is no right answer, of course. Cricket is on course-correction mode, seeking to erase its ‘elitist’ reputation. But when only 12 countries play the longest, most traditional format (Tests) and only eight more are part of the ODI ecosystem, it finds itself in the middle of a grim battle somewhat lightened by the tremendous response to the slam-bang 20-over module.
