I don't know about you but what is the point of narrowing the game. ICC should have done more by organising more bilateral series between big guns and other minnows like ireland, Zimbabwe and other teams so that they have more exposure before playing in the WC. 14 team tournament is perfect. Zimbabwe and Ireland can handle their own and you can two other nation who get more exposure at the highest level. No point narrowing the game.
I definitely don't disagree with the idea of a bigger tournament. The best format will always be two groups narrowing down into QFs and SFs. However, without sounding like a broken clock, I can see why there are only 10 teams in this tournament. Theres a huge gap in quality between:
England, India, Australia and New Zealand
And
South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, West Indies (the one we've seen over the last few years) and Afghanistan.
What I've been saying is that adding Ireland, Kenya, Zimbabwe etc. serves no real purpose at the moment. We'll end up seeing a handful of competitive games such is disrcrepancy. The FIFA WC works in football because not only is the sport more popular but there isnt a huge difference in quality between different tiers of teams i.e. tier 1 isnt a much better than tier 2 and tier 2 isnt so much better than tier 3. It doesnt work for cricket because there simply aren't enough good teams.
Thats just my reasoning behind the poor start to the world cup. And I don't see how adding more associates will improve quality. England have actually set a new standard in ODIs and thats the fct that an SR of 100 is no longer good enough.
