Let’s head straight to the southern tip of Africa for the grand unveiling of
the schedule for the 2027 World Cup – a tournament whose tagline is “Three Nations, One Heartbeat”, but might as well be “Three Nations, One Daddy”, if you catch our drift.
But seriously, in these turbulent times, it’s heartening to see the traditions of our great game remain sacrosanct. The ICC has coffers to fill,
pour encourager les autres – hence India and Pakistan being “drawn” in the same group once again. They will, in the words of the accompanying press release, “renew their iconic competitiveness at Wanderers Stadium”, which is certainly one way of describing
a record that reads India 15-1 Pakistan (plus one tie, which India won on a bowl-out) across ODI and T20I World Cup encounters.
And in case one dose of “iconic competitiveness” isn’t enough for you, the new format features a Super Seven stage and the tantalising prospect of another India vs Pakistan fixture. We can, of course, only speculate about the reasons why, but the Light Roller suspects someone at the ICC may have mixed up the fable about the goose that laid the golden eggs with the recipe for making foie gras.
Anyway, back to the comfortingly familiar and India have been slotted for the both the final game of the main group stage and, assuming they get through (wibble!), the final game of the Super 7. They’re also in action on a “blockbuster opening weekend” – despite a) the Super Series (sic) preceding it and b) Thursday not being the weekend – against Australia. Because what are we here for, after all?
As an aside, the 2027 World Cup structure is a thing of beauty: 14 teams to start with, three of which get to play a little pre-tournament round-robin; squished down to 12 in two groups of six; followed by a single group of seven; and then finally, more than six weeks later, the last four reaching the semi-finals. And to think some people have the front to suggest the ODI World Cup has become a bloated waste of time!
Bloated it may be, but ICC comps still tickle the bean counters in ways that bilaterals increasingly don’t. And if there’s one thing that cricket knows for sure, it’s who pays the bills.
Eight years after Sandpapergate and Australia are back playing Test cricket in South Africa to… well, general indifference, if the crowd numbers
in Durban are anything to go by. But don’t make the mistake of thinking everyone has moved on from that time when Steven Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft took their enthusiasm for
Bunnings Warehouse a little too far.
Asked about Usman Khawaja’s forthcoming autobiography, amid reports that he will have his say on what went on in Cape Town,
Pat Cummins brushed it off: “Uz gave me a buzz a few weeks back… Tell your story. It’s fine.” Which is quite different to the response given in 2021 by Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon, calling for “
an end to the rumour-mongering and innuendo“, after Bancroft suggested the bowlers were in on it, too. Are there any DIY demons still lurking in the Australia sheds? If Khawaja’s book gives us chapter and verse, we might be about to find out.
The ECB “strongly condemns the treatment of women and girls … under the Taliban regime”, therefore England don’t play bilateral cricket against Afghanistan. But the ICC, of which the ECB is a Full Member, has nothing to say on the matter – so England do play Afghanistan at ICC tournaments (rather than, say, forfeit the points). Now
some Englishmen might want to go and earn their T20 corn in the country, which the ECB won’t get in the way of, because of legal niceties like restraint of trade. But those players could, y’know, take “the right moral stance”, in the words of ECB director of men’s cricket, Rob Key, and pull out. Good luck navigating with that moral compass, guys!
Source link