Is the New ICC Cricket World Cup format a hit or flop?

This year’s ICC Cricket World Cup is a bit different. It’s not only about rains ruining the matches but also about the length of the tournament.

When the England team destroyed the Afghanistan bowling line up in the recently concluded match of the World Cup, I blamed this new format for this. The question here is for how long a new team like Afghanistan would be humiliated in 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup?

This tournament is played in a round robin format where every team has to play against nine other teams. Due to this, the relatively weak teams like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have to play their matches against seven strong teams. If we think about the 4 or 5 cricket teams that are comparatively stronger than the rest, then they are also playing their matches against 5 or 6 weaker teams! That means, multiple records will be broken and we would be witnessing more boring matches in this Cricket World Cup. Also, thanks to non-ending English rains for that.

The ICC Cricket World Cup is supposed to be an interesting tournament where every match must be crucial for each team. Every game must be played as a knock-out match for cricket teams.

In the previous seasons, the competition had been quite intense where many weak teams like Kenya, Bangladesh knocked out strong teams from the tournament. This all happened due to the pool playing format where the competition was extremely tough. Every team in each match had the capability to knock out the other based on their day’s performance. This no longer will happen in this format. This Cricket World Cup, each team will continue to play until everyone becomes sure that they are better or weaker than then rest nine teams of the tournament. That sounds boring, Isn’t it?

Such a format (Round robin) works well in a T20 tournament where every game is unpredictable until the last ball is bowled. However, that doesn’t happen in 50 over matches. Here, few games are enough to decide which one is a better team and consistent to perform well. Then why there is a need to keep proving it again for n number of times? Also, the team which is weak, why they have to keep getting humiliated until everyone knows that they are actually the weakest in the tournament.

Below are the advantages and disadvantages of the round-robin format of ICC Cricket World Cup 2019:

Disadvantages:
1. Long and boring tournament.
2. No unpredictability in the tournament. All matches are not interesting and the tournament is becoming quite straight forward.
3. Humiliating to the weaker teams to keep losing.

Advantages:
1. Opportunity for cricket teams to play against every other team and gain exposure.
2. Only the best teams are moved to the semifinals. No scope of others.
3. Opportunity for teams to break more records.