One of the queries raised before and now being brought up again is the merit of holding the ICC World Cup in England’s fickle weather. With two enticing matches rained out and another decided by the Duckworth-Lewis method, there is a debate on what it does to the points table and subsequently to the determination of the winner of the tournament.
If luck does play a role, the intervention of rain or the disruption of the weather on the play at hand, depending on where the team is positioned in the points table, must be considered one of the factors that determine not only the outcome of a cricket match but also, as in this case, the outcome of a prestigious, top tier tournament such as the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup.
Still yet to touch the two-week mark, the 2019 edition has already seen the abandonment of two big matches. The game between Pakistan and Sri Lanka might not have seemed important given Sri Lanka’s presently lowly situation vis-à-vis some of the other teams. But given Pakistan’s see-saw appearance already, it could have made a huge difference in how the numbers stack up in the end. The game between the West Indies and South Africa was shaping up to be an absorbing one, and with South Africa pushed with their backs to the wall, it could have been the one that would make or break them. If nothing, it could have had a telling effect on the West Indies’ scintillating journey in decades at the Cricket World Cup.
But with teams having to share one point each and having to settle for matches where their own performance has had little say in the outcome more than once is once too many. In that light, the merit of holding a World Cup at the height of what has been considered unpredictable conditions in how the pitches shape up – dried out on a sunny day or with just enough moisture on an overcast day, has already made the toss a dubious one, resulting in some matches being fairly a foregone conclusion, even if they have ended up being closer than originally anticipated.
With the international schedule a jam-packed affair and the Indian Premier League leading the precedent of dedicated window in the calendar that even the ICC is afraid to disrupt, one wonders if compromises are being made to the timing and scheduling, and the itinerary set up of such tournaments because the ICC cannot impose enough force to create a window where all cricket boards are willing to temporarily suspend their own agendas and bilateral series.
While weather is a part of the cricket culture, with a tournament as small as ten teams and with so much pressure to create a spectacular event, it seems that this is one of the more self-inflicted wounds that such a long tournament must nurse. A compromised story has meant that in less than two weeks, two potentially eyeball grabbing matches have been ruined by inclement weather and there is little assurance that there will not be more matches that will go the same way.