Champions Trophy - Preview

Its time for champions trophy 2009, phew finally after all what happened when it was scheduled in Pakistan(2008) its finally good to see that it will start in few hours from now all be it at a different location, seems like South Africa is turning out to be a great host for variety of competition across various disciplines.

Now lets focus on the task at hand, a task which is bigger than just winning the champions trophy, the task is to settle the talks of wheatear its time for 50 Over format to take a back seat and let its young baby take over or to let the world know that this format is here to stay and just frenzy feeling of 20 20 cricket is not enough to replace this.

While ICC has its task cut out while preserving the one day format, champion’s trophy in more ways than one will answer where we head from now. While the format and schedule is as perfect as it could be it will all boil down to what kind of matches we get. Congrats to ICC for keeping only top 8 Teams in the fray many times we have had too many one sided contests in World Cup, while its no disrespect to the BAN or ZIM am sure they will accept they still have a way to go before they can catch up the big daddies of world cricket.

ICC has to promote the game across the world and 20 -20 cricket might just be the tool it ever needed , many times when I was in US I was asked oh how do you manage to get 5 days or 1 day just to sit in front of TV and watch a game? The biggest problem in western world in adopting cricket is time. They just cant agree that they have a full day just to sit in front of tv and admire the sports, for them it has to be more or Friday evening when they can head to a game, grab a beer and nice company and enjoy the game for 2-3 Hrs max. That’s where I believe ICC has to market 20-20 cricket well. While the advantage of 20-20 cricket should be taken to popularize the game, unfortunately for now what its doing is just the opposite.

As they say, bring them on….