Cricket: Five World cups in last three years

Yes will you believe it, there have been five world cups in last three years and we used to think world cup comes once in four years. There have been five world cups in three years:

1) ICC Champions Trophy 2006
2) ICC Cricket World Cup 2007
3) ICC T20 World Cup 2007
4) ICC T20 World Cup 2009
5) ICC Champions Trophy 2009







ICC has become cash rich body and still it wants to milk the cash cow. Players have become fatigued and there has been same winner (Australia) on three occasions but still ICC wants to conduct T20 every 2 years, champion’s trophy every two years and world cup every four years which gives roughly 5 trophies in one rotation. If you go back little more time, there has been one world cup every year in the period 2002-2004 and 1998-2000.

In the year 1998 when Jagmohan Dalmiya (the clever business magnate) was the ICC president, he introduced this new trophy called champions trophy. The main reason given then was that even though ICC was the main governing body of the cricket game, it did not have any money in its kitty. Thus he gave birth to this idea of champions trophy every two years which would cough up so much money to make ICC self reliant in its methods and help to develop its smaller member countries.






Now when ICC is so rich, do we need to see so many global tournaments at such a fast pace. What it does in short is to take the sheen out of such tournaments and the main source of income (spectators) loses the interest in global tournaments. With the result that India was world champions only 2 years ago but still do not get the deserved attention. The reason why the tournaments of grand scale, be it Olympics, soccer world cup, European championship etc comes once in four years is to keep the general public always glued to such tournaments which in turns gives such tournaments such a huge popularity.

I think it is high time that the Champion’s trophy is scrapped and the T20 world cup gets lesser participating countries (probably six is right). This will give the spectators some open space to think and more importantly gives the winner the necessary attention. Pakistan the present T20 champions will be defending their trophy in nine months time is something totally inconceivable. This makes us to think whether making money is the ICC’s sole objective. Shouldn’t the tournament deserve the much needed respect?