After looking head and shoulders above the competition in the group stage, the Cricket World Cup did not end up with India. Instead, it was Australia who triumphed in the final, raising several questions about both the purpose and future of the World Cup.
For many, there is a sense of injustice. Amongst fans and ex-players, the argument goes that India were the best team throughout and as such deserved to win the whole thing. As good as India were, and they were fantastic, this logic fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of a tournament.
Tournaments in sport do not exist to be a scientific method for determining the best team in the world. If this was the intention then we would see the entire thing be based around a points system, looking to create equal conditions to see who is the best.
Beyond that we might forego the concept of a tournament entirely. If we want to crown the best team in the world we simply look at the last four years of ODI cricket and work from there.
Instead, a tournament is a spectacle. You take the best teams in the world and you create a bit of drama with the notion that anyone can become champion.
Where the ODI World Cup is peculiar is in its hybrid nature. By having everyone play everyone you get a full picture of what the teams are like in comparison to each other, you then look beyond these rankings to crown the champion.
What it often creates is a situation like this year, a team stands tall at the end of the group stage but fails to win the whole thing. In this happening you end the tournament with a tidal wave of drama compared to the ripples of the group stage.
One takeaway from this is that cricket could do with embracing knockout matches more. The group stage system does a stellar job of taking jeopardy out of proceedings, relying on the final three matches to make up for this.
This comes from teams putting in middling performances and still crawling into the semi-finals, but also in the damage it does to upset results. The Netherlands beating South Africa should have been a massive moment, but in the grand scheme of things it meant very little for the tournament.
The main obstacle to doing this is the unfortunate tendency in cricket to want to shrink the game. Instead of embracing a system which brings more teams to the World Cup, cricket prefers to keep it down to just ten teams.
A possible alternative would be to invite more teams and transition to a system of many groups. What this avoids is the current situation where everyone plays everyone, and as such prevents the current India predicament from happening.
A tournament should feel special and raising the stakes of individual matches is a highly effective way to do it. If cricket wants to make the World Cup as engaging as possible, it would do well to embrace danger.
