Cricket World Cup, you say? Haven’t we just had one of those? You’re probably thinking of the one England won in 2022, or the one Australia won in 2021, and there’ll be another one in 2024, but those were and will be all in the Twenty20 format – 20 overs a side, to the uninitiated – while this one offers two-and-a-half times the fun with each innings lasting 50 overs. The last men’s World Cup in this format was way back in 2019. This one starts on 5 October and ends 46 giddy days later on 19 November.
Who’s involved? There are 10 teams: all but three of the International Cricket Council’s full member nations – the Test-playing countries – and one associate member. The missing trio are Ireland, Zimbabwe and West Indies, who won the first two World Cups, reached the final of the third and have never failed to qualify before. Only the top two in this year’s final qualifying round, played in Zimbabwe in June and July, made it to the finals and West Indies finished fifth in the Super Six stage, losing to everyone they faced except Oman. Sri Lanka and the Netherlands, the one associate nation, emerged from the pack, the former with a 100% record, the latter courtesy of a net run rate slightly better than Scotland’s and quite a lot better than Zimbabwe’s, all three sides having finished level on points.
Net what? Cricket doesn’t just offer thrilling sport, you see, there’s exciting maths to do as well. In addition to popular group-stage tiebreaker net run rate (the average number of runs a team scores per available over minus the average runs per over scored against them. The word available is key here, because if a team is bowled out after, say, 22 overs the calculation is made using the full 50 they might have faced had they been less clumsy) there’s also the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, or DLS to its friends, used to calculate a fair target score in a rain-interrupted match, which would be far too complicated to explain here even if we understood it well enough to try but seems to do its job reasonably well.
Wasn’t there another wacky tiebreaker when England won the last World Cup? There was indeed. The 2019 final between England and New Zealand ended in a tie, so the teams played a super over – each facing six more legal deliveries – at the end of which they were still tied. So there was a boundary countback, which involved totting up the number of fours and sixes each team had scored across the day, in which England triumphed 26-17. Everyone agreed that was jolly silly, so if the same situation happens again in this year’s knockout rounds the teams will just play as many super overs as are required to split them.
Is rain going to be a thing? Very possibly. India are this year’s hosts, and though October is towards the tail-end of their rainy season, in some of the host cities it is some way away from being dry. As a general rule the further south you go at this time of year the greater the chance of rainfall, so the tournament’s northernmost venue, Dharamsala, has on average about two rainy days in October, while the southernmost, Bengaluru, has about 11. The three knockout matches all have reserve days, but the group stage is already big enough without such luxuries.
How big, precisely? The format flings all 10 teams into one big group, so by the time everyone has faced each other 45 games will have been played, or at least attempted, and whoever is in the top four positions will progress to the semi-finals. The same format was used in 2019 but this will be its final outing, with the 2027 event being expanded to 14 teams. Games are being played in 10 stadiums scattered all over the country, though some teams are doing more travelling than others: most at some point have at least one week-long, two-game period in one city. A lucky couple – New Zealand and Afghanistan – have two. Only England and India are constantly on the move.
That sounds like a significant disadvantage Apparently not: India are the favourites – and the last three 50-over World Cups have been won by host countries – followed in the bookmakers’ estimations by England (who won the last World Cup), Australia (who won the one before that) and Pakistan (who haven’t won since 1992 but are quite good). The Netherlands are clearly outsiders, but every team has enough talent to cause anyone who underestimates them real problems. The competition’s format reflects the format being used in the competition: as in one-day internationals, there is enough time for teams to stumble a couple of times and still turn it around. In 2019 India and Australia sailed into the semi-finals with only one and two defeats respectively, while England and New Zealand snuck in with three (Pakistan also lost three but fell foul of those net run rate calculations).
With only two semi-finals and a final, at least the knockout rounds will be straightforward Well, kind of. In theory the semi-finals will pit the team that top the supergroup against the fourth-placed side in Mumbai, while the teams that end up second and third will face each other in Kolkata. But if Pakistan are involved they will play in Kolkata wherever they finish, which might mean the second and third teams end up in Mumbai, and if India qualify they will play in Mumbai wherever they finish, which could push the first and fourth teams to Kolkata, though if both India and Pakistan qualify and have to play each other they default to Kolkata. In short, best hold off on the hotel bookings for now.
Nothing like leaving things to the last minute Well, that does seem to be a theme. When the last ODI World Cup was held in England in 2019 the full schedule was announced a little more than a year before it began, on 26 April 2018, and the last tickets went on sale on 27 September, 250 days before the tournament started. This time the schedule was announced on 27 June, then had to be revised because of various complaints and diary clashes. The final version, which saw nine games moved to different days or starting at different times “with the aim of providing the best possible World Cup experience to players and fans”, came out less than two months before the big start and only then could organisers start to sell tickets, with the first ones going on sale on 25 August, about five weeks before they will start being used. For some games they are still, according to the tournament’s website, “coming soon”. No hurry.
Being a World Cup, there is presumably a mascot and an anthem Absolutely. The ICC is introducing a pair of mascots in this competition, currently known affectionately as “the female character” and “the male character” while the results of a poll to find catchier names are passed through various “cultural and linguistic experts” for approval but now officially christened Blaze and Tonk. Apparently they come from “a cricketing utopia called the Crictoverse”, with Blaze boasting “a turbo-powered arm propelling fireballs at lightning speed” and Tonk an “electromagnetic bat and versatile shot repertoire that electrify the crease”. It is not immediately obvious how an electromagnetic bat would be of much benefit in actual cricket, and testing the theory out would almost certainly result in a lengthy ban. Meanwhile the anthem, Dil Jashn Bole, was written by Pritam, a Bollywood composer famous enough not to require a surname, and is described as “an expression of the cornucopia of emotions and waves of energy the tournament promises to deliver”.
What do the winners get? A medal, sporting immortality, the chance to hold aloft a fine trophy, and a cornucopia of emotions and waves of energy. But if that isn’t motivation enough there’s also a share of $4m, from a total prize pot of $10m. This is precisely the same as in 2019, with the ICC’s budgets stretched by its recent commitment to pay equal prize money in the equivalent women’s competition (when the last women’s 50-over World Cup was held they had to make do with a prize pot of $3.5m, itself double what was on offer in the previous tournament, so we’re not talking about a small change, or about small change).
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