Cricket: From the Far End

The world cup can run 48 days and half the duration totally uninteresting matches can be played but the all important final has to be played on its scheduled day despite the rain and bad light? That’s hard to understand. Unless the forecast for the next couple of days was about heavy rains (doesn’t look like it was, at least here), what was the hurry to somehow squeeze the game that day? The next day was a Sunday and people who were there on Saturday would most likely be there the next day as well. And I don’t think cricket authorities decide these things based on whether spectators can make it.

Reading the reports it looks like they wanted to play it the same day and have it of a reasonable duration. But I doubt there was enough time for that. Any local authorities would have known around when it gets too dark to play cricket and they should have calculated that time properly. But a 25 over final for a world cup would have looked ridiculous and for some reasons they wanted to play the game yesterday only.

Depending on how you look at it, it was either unfair to the team batting second or it meant Sri Lanka did not plan the innings to stay “at D/L par” at about 25 overs which probably would have been a little bit easier than chasing down 281. The confident Ponting at least didn’t seem to be hoping to not have to use the second power play as he used it from 11th over. There were only two power plays, unlike three because of the 38 over match.

While here I don’t think it would have made a big difference, I always wonder why they don’t have best of three finals for tournament of such a long duration. With that at least the winner won’t be decided just based on who played well on that day. Again I don’t think it would have mattered yesterday as Adam Gilchrist, who scored only two fifties in the tournament and that too against Bangladesh and Netherlands, scored when it was most required.