Its all past by, but could we possibly remember that we are talking about a silly sport and stay calm while talking about things? We got a few reports of posts, nothing that I'd personally consider actionable by themselves but it got to the point where I probably would have closed the thread had things not naturally moved on.
We have a thread for World Cup format somewhere: my position is that you shouldn't have a competition that forces the associates (and Zimbabwe and Bangladesh for that matter, despite the latter getting to the quarter finals instead of England) to "qualify" or "prove their place" or whatever since they've already done that; its called the World Cricket League Division 1 and the World Cricket League Championship. You either have a round of qualifications where everyone including the test teams qualify for a tournament in a centralised location (look at very old European Football Championships for an example of what I mean) or you give test nations free entry and make everyone go through the group stages. The main thing that associates need are ODIs against full member states and the only times those happen is in World Cup years, and all these "good formats" do is take those away from all the associate teams. If Scotland get more than the ONE game they got against a full member in all of 2012 and 14 and the THREE they got in 2013 (god bless Pakistan) all at home then I'd accept a competition with a preliminary round - and its the same for the other associate nations and even worse for the Netherlands and the UAE who are completely ignored. That isn't going to happen.
There already is a tournament for all the test nations to play each other - its called the Champions Trophy. The World Cup should be designed to grow the bloody sport, not for the three big nations to suck up even more money that they don't need. I don't give a shit if it creates "boring" games or whatever - although that argument is wrong, until the South Africa-New Zealand semi the best game in this competition was Scotland-Afghanistan, with Ireland-UAE close behind. Beside, the proposed format of me is four groups of four, with quarters, semis and a final. That's going to be much quicker than the terrible format that the ICC are using in 2019, even if you inflate it a bit to guarantee your India-Pakistan game.
Rugby had World Cup. What that's done is help to grow the thing in a kinda big market called the USA, as well as develop the quality of the game in other nations. That's exactly what Cricket needs to do: if the competition takes too long then start playing two games a day and stop having useless rest days in the middle of a SEVEN WEEK tournament.
What I'm saying is listen to former Scotland player Rahul Dravid, and that guy called Sachin something or other. They get it.
You can't respond to an England fan by telling them we will never win the World Cup. We know that, and have done since 1992. You're going to have to raise your game.
Trust me, its funnier when you get that response as a Scotland fan... If Scotland ever win the Cricket World Cup then I'll be... very surprised, quite frankly.
its mostly meant to resonate with ind - pak folk
This is an old post but feel free to still post them, I personally just don't think they are funny and scroll past them.
What I don't like about this World Cup schedule is that we have missed some great matches like Ind vs NZ, South Africa vs Aus... etc. I think there should only be 10 teams and all play against each other i.e. about 9 matches each. And then followed by 2 semifinals and a final.
