I’m not hopeful.
For all of you from outside our lovely country you should be warned that the next few days are likely to be rain affected. London, especially south of the river got it yesterday, just about reaching Southampton to abandon yesterday’s match, and the south west is looking bad today. More heavy rain is forecast for Wednesday and Thursday. That good drainage that is a blight on test wickets is going to come into play if the rain does cease.
This game appears to be of little consequence. Neither of the two participants look likely to make the semis. However it will be interesting to see how Bangladesh are rising and Sri Lanka are falling if that’s the way it pans out. There’s certainly positivity heading in the Tigers’ direction and not a lot for Sri Lanka.
Good luck in Bristol in avoiding a second successive washout for Sri Lanka. If there is any play, or if you have any other thoughts on stuff like tedious guitar riffs, brave run chases, Kohli the gent, or the retirement of the enigmatic Yuvraj, then fire away.
I’m off to monitor Rain Alarm Pro.
Comments below.
Being Outside Cricket 
To be fair, the washout against Pakistan was probably more a free point for Sri Lanka, than a lost point. They had never scored a single point against Pakistan in World Cups before then …
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If Sri Lanka had been a serious contender (results in bilateral series in the past three years suggest they are not), they have dropped 2 points due to no fault of their own now (against some of the easier teams (eg. not India, Australia, England, New Zealand). Basically requires them to make up for that by beating more fancied sides, if the weather holds for all the other games (which is doubtful).
Also, due to two washouts, and a shortened game, their NRR is much more volatile than it otherwise would have been, thus an extreme result, one way or the other can really improve / destroy the NRR tiebreaker for them.
Even in the 2017 Champions Trophy, it was not unimaginable that Australia could have qualified for the semis / gotten themselves eliminated after 3 washouts. And even more perversely, lost the semi on a washout as well, if it had thus transpired.
Now, I know it is luck of the draw and all that, but a World Cup should not be decided by that.
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Since there is no cricket to watch, some of you may want to check out Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act episode on cricket corruption
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Stoneman’s got a fifty at last! Yep. Jamaica 1998 – meant we saw the last two days of the re-arranged Trinidad test and the scheduled one. 1-1 I believe due to Carl Hooper in the first match…
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Match abandoned. Much gnashing of teeth about our weather. Anyone remember that Champions Trophy where the weather was so crap they just shared the trophy for the Final? Think that was in Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile there’s an article in The Cricketer online edition that piqued my interest…
https://www.thecricketer.com/Topics/banner/world_cup_exposing_how_cricket_is_living_on_a_life-support_machine.html
Cricket will die if people at the top are paid outside the limits of the revenue their status derives. That’s not just players, but officials. If you have a £1m budget for a film, you can’t hire Spielberg to direct, The Rock to star, and distribute it to every cinema in the world. But English cricket thinks it can pay its top players a million each, and its top official £700k. Which made me blanche at this quote…
“Some England players earn £1 million-per-annum thanks to their central contracts. New competitions such as the Kia Super League have improved the competitiveness of women’s cricket, while Sky are planning a number of events to engage youngsters. And then there is The Hundred. Chief-executive Tom Harrison is earning every penny after his spell with IMG.”
As I pointed out in a previous post, Harrison did not increase revenue from the visit of India last year over and above the revenue derived on their previous visit, but doubled the CEO salary, presumably because he’s somehow persuaded Sky to part with a couple of billion over 5 years, a deal that makes absolutely zero sense for a channel that didn’t stump up the extra dosh for the IPL.
Something odd is going on. A bit like the dinner scene in Carry On Up The Khyber. The biggest international competition in world cricket is passing the nation by and no-one, but no-one, blames Sky. There was nothing we could do. So while people who should know better, some supposedly on the fans and blogger side, look back to pre-2005 and slag off the coverage, the environment is better on digital TV now to spread the game. Sky’s coverage of the NFL is really good, but there’s a reason the Superbowl is on traditional TV. They want to grow interest (revenue) in the game. You put the biggest events for all to see. It’s so simple, even I can work that one out.
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Does anyone have any figures for what happened to F One racing since they stuck it behind a pay wall? Slightly different as that sport is a wash with money, but there is a small amount of people who will pay to watch all these sports at the high monthly premiums. Lewis Hamilton is now a five times winner, yet he seems a little bit more invisiable these days.
I wouldn’t pay extra for that sport, so again is it all being paid for by football fans? I do wonder if the Premiership was to demand all the money paid to cricket and other sports would Sky drop these other events?
A billion contract here and a billion contract there and soon you are talking serious money. But it all adds up and someone has to pay for it.
On a lighter note,and an entry in the “GREATEST EVER” stakes I was amused to,see,The BBC posing the question after the Anthony Joshua fight……”Was this the greatest round of boxing ever?”
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Sky are usually protective of their audience figures. But the move from live to highlights on Channel 4 has been unsurprisingly catastrophic for viewing figures.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/csylt/2019/05/09/formula-one-loses-3-4-million-viewers-on-free-to-air-tv-in-britain/
According to this article, 800k-1m watched the Monaco Grand Prix on Sky, compared to 700k last year.
https://motorsportbroadcasting.com/tag/ratings/
However, go further down the articles and the audience figures aren’t as crash hot. I think Sky do a really, really good job, and indeed watched them over Channel 4 last year. I’ve got back into F1, for some reason.
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Very interesting, cheers. Most sports it seems have now decided lots of up front money trumps viewing figures. Some sports can get away with that more than others in the long run. Not sure cricket can.
For those who can’t afford or won’t pay the subscriptions it’s almost like the days before TV. But then ticket prices were much cheaper to go to the event.
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The problem is that the huge sum of cash upfront is cannibalising the future health / value of rights. Cricket definitely suffers from that. And the Kolpakisation of domestic cricket (thus depleting South Africa) will only accelerate the decrease in value of international cricket, as more and more will struggle to remain competitive.
But it is not just cricket. La Liga for instance could be reduced to just 6 games instead of the 380 fixtures they have in a season. And that is because Atlético are punching above their weight.
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I just want to make a minor yet fully-researched point which I think nevertheless backs up the “exposure” argument.
BBC SPOTY. Now, I hate the effing sight of it these days, but it’s one of the few measures we have of sporting fame and a common complaint is how cricketers aren’t nominated (e.g. Root a couple of years ago). But what happens when they are? Here are figures for England under Sky, which also coincided with the introduction of the nomination/shortlist system:
Monty Panesar 2006 – not in top 3 out of 10, full figures not available
Peak era:
Strauss 2009 – 8th of 10 (3.3% of vote)
Swann 2010 – 9th of 10 (2%)
Strauss and Cook 2011 – 6th and 7th of 10 at the absolute peak of Flower’s England (5.3% and 3.8%). Behind Mark Cavendish, who won by miles, Darren Clarke, Mo Farah for a gold and *silver* and, er, Luke Donald.
Bell 2013 – 10th of 10 (0.8%)
Post-Flower:
Anya Shrubsole 2017 – 9th of 12 (2.8%)
James Anderson 2018 – not in the top 3 out of 6, votes not recorded but listed 6th of 6 on Wikipedia and it’s not in alphabetical order.
Nobody made the top 3. I think 2011 by itself is a damning indictment of the consequences of hiding cricket away, but what do I know?
Prior to that, everyone knows Botham and Flintoff are the only winners in the last 40 years. But how many know this about top 3 placings under free votes:
Ian Botham 1985, 2nd – had as much (and probably more) to do with his John o’Groats to Land’s End charity walk during the voting period as his terrific all-round effort in the 1985 Ashes. But even so, interesting.
Graham Gooch 1990, 3rd – the unique achievement of 1,000 runs in an English summer on FTA is remembered months later in spite of the BBC missing his 300th run. Who knew, Paul?
Andrew Flintoff 2004, 3rd *in an Olympic year*, highest-placed non-Olympian – this one surprised me. But apparently no-one cared about cricket until the fluke of 2005.
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Dave Richardson, Chief Idiot at the ICC, has spoken out against reserve days. What is so hard to have say 3 reserve days at the end of the group fixtures, at say two venues to play a maximum of six games (in order of relevance to the tourney, allowing for at least one rest day if a team that is in the hunt has suffered two washouts)?
As for the costs of hosting the teams an additional three days, if the costs are that massive, how come the group stages last about 40 days at an exorbitant cost?
If the group fixtures are so expensive to host, why not have two pools of 5 teams, so reduce the number of fixtures by half? (Not a proponent of it, but if costs can be used as an excuse, the simplest way to reduce cost is just that).
Oh, the tournament would take too long. Funny how that was the perfect EXCUSE to LENGTHEN the tournament in 2019, compared to 2015.
Needless to say, I am not impressed with the latest utterances from Richardson.
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Someone IMPORTANT disagrees with you:
I expect you feel terrible about that and will be consumed with existential angst for the next 39 days.
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The ICC and others have made it abundantly clear. The integrity of the TV contracts trumps the integrity of the tournament. There are arguments that reserve days may mean fans don’t get refunds if they’ve travelled and can’t do the extra day but that could be sorted.
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The same fans who basically get pissed on, when the game is a washout, and are allowed to tell their families that the World Cup was such a great affair, that the only game they had tickets for was a washout, so that they travelled across the world to not even see a single ball bowled at a venue?
Those fans?
Yeah, let’s not consider inconveniencing them by playing some actual cricket.
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Those fans indeed, D.
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Here is an eminently reasonable and sensible article from a writer many of us have doubted in the past – Rooto will probably need a sit down for starters.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2019/jun/11/cricket-world-cup-televised-coverage
I look forward to seeing what those who KNOW BEST make of it.
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The end of the penultimate paragraph, about YouTube is so out of date as to be untrue. The authorities are now all over that like a bad suit. Ask Rob Moody, aka Robelinda.
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It is getting to the point that you have to download them (illegally of course – better avenues than Youtube available for that), without having any idea of whether the game is interesting enough to warrant such action, and then watch away.
Then you have to pray the cops don’t show up on your doorstep, for copyright infringement, and that you will be either fined a huge sum of money or will be spending the night in remand.
But if you are lucky, you might run into Ben Stokes or Alex Hales. How is that for engagement?
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