The World Cup should be changed into a 16-team tournament writes Cricket Fanatic Matthew Visser. 

The 2019 Cricket World Cup came to a thrilling close on Sunday evening as England’s Eoin Morgan lifted the iconic trophy. 

This has now allowed us, as avid cricket fans, to reflect on the past month’s action and decide if it was a success or not. Hopefully the lyric “Stand by..” will finally get out of our heads as well.

This year’s edition saw the introduction of a new format, similar to that of the 1992 World Cup. 10 teams participated in a round-robin format. This saw each team play against all 9 other participating teams to eventually create a ‘top 4’ to participate in the semi-final stage.

This format eliminated any excuses of having “easy pools” or “easier roots to the final”.  At the end of the day, no one could argue against the fact that the 4 best teams qualified for the semi-final stage.

Yes, this format does seem to be “fair”, but is it really the best way to promote the game itself?

The issue I would like to address is the fact that only 10 teams participated in this World Cup. That is 4 teams fewer than the 2015 and 2011 World Cups, which both featured 14 teams.

This has also led to the overall worldwide coverage of the World Cup being constrained. Looking at it closely, only 5 regions were represented by the participating teams. 

South Africa and England served as the only African and European teams respectively, while the West Indies served as the only team from the Americas. Australia and New Zealand represented Australasia, while the Asian contingent was tightly made up of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

Keeping in mind that the match between India and Pakistan brought in an enormous number of viewers, I feel that the number of viewers for the World Cup as a whole would greatly rise with the increase of participants (and in turn, regions).

There are several associate members of the ICC that would jump at the chance to play World Cup cricket.  The likes of Ireland, the Netherlands and Scotland would all be welcome additions.  Even the inclusion of Zimbabwe would add a greater African presence, and could no doubt hold their own against the “big teams”.

America and Canada would perhaps be the greatest inclusions in terms of spreading the game West to the Americas.  Canada has already dipped its toes into cricketing waters with the implementation of its own Global T20 league set to kick off later this month.

Reverting to 16 teams could see the use of a group stage in the tournament once again. 4 Groups of 4 teams would see 24 matches being played before a “Super 8” stage or semi-final stage would take place.

Groups would be organized through ICC rankings to ensure that there would be no “group of death” or “easy group” for one of the “big teams”.

I thoroughly believe that this would only be beneficial to the game in terms of spreading the appeal to the rest of the world. And who knows, there could be a dark horse or underdog who manages to cause a few upsets.

Photo: Cricket World Cup/Twitter