Posted by Don’t know. New Zealand are yet to make any runs and yet have won both games, the Windies are also unbeaten, while everyone else has lost at least once.
England looked like the England of old in their first match. South Africa failed to defend a million. Sri Lanka have seemingly forgotten how to play cricket. India were skittled. Bangladesh and Afghanistan are yet to trouble the scorers.
Pakistan are a notch up from where they’ve been in recent months, which puts them at notch one. Australia actually won today, but still did a passable impression of losing for a portion of the game (which is no mean feat when they basically won easily).
It’s all been rather fun and with less than half the teams going through to the next round, there’s an unusual hint of jeopardy about proceedings. It all seems too good to be true.
They’re not even playing the final on a Monday lunchtime like they did in 2007. It’s on a Sunday. An actual weekend day. Like in a proper tournament in a normal sport.
Good to see you off the fence, providing incisive analysis and potentially embarrassing predictions, as usual, KC.
There is a group of death and a group of dearth for this tournament, is there not? Your “op ed” is silent on that point.
Still, the shorter the form of cricket, the more random the results, especially those of more mercurial teams such as Pakistan and West Indies.
The tournament structure makes the tournament as a whole strangely fascinating to follow, even if the individual games don’t entice me towards my TV and/or wakefulness all that much.
I think the format , where all games are actually important, makes the group games far more interesting, and also means you have to actually play well to qualify for the knockouts, as opposed to the 50 over version where you only have to play somewhat competently to qualify.
‘Group of death and group of dearth’. I doubt it, because my first thought was to wonder which you meant. Group 1 has the last 3 winners in it, along with SA who just beat India in India in this format last tie they were here, though I think the winner this time will probably come from group 2.
Everyone’s rubbish. They should all just go home now to save embarrassment. Except Afghanistan. They can stay and win the trophy.
And THERE HAVE BEEN ALMOST 200 GATORADE SUPER-SIXES OMG WOW I’M SO EXCITED RIGHT NOW
No boundaries though.
Indeed. It’s like cricketeering with Napalm Death.