Bidding an indifferent goodbye to the ICC Champions Trophy

The last edition of the Champions Trophy is underway. Because it rains a lot in England, chances to play cricket are far and few between.

It is difficult to judge the quality of a tournament when it has already been scrapped and is being played with relative enthusiasm by the competing teams. The emotions that it evokes are really ambiguous. It began in 1998 as a crisp knockout tournament and was in fact named so: the ICC Knockout Tournament. It was intended as a competition that would take the game to new markets and hence the trophy traveled to Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Nairobi (Kenya). The tournament’s format was haphazard and they did not kick off in a particularly good fashion and hence the tournament began to soul-search and eventually metamorphose into what is being played today.

2002 saw more than a change in name as it became the Champions Trophy; changing its USP from being a knockout tournament to being a twelve team tournament (including top 10 test playing nations and Netherlands and Kenya) in league + knockout format pretty similar to how the World Cup is now contested. That competition was catastrophic for its own unique reasons. The rule regarding matches washed out by rain was that they had to restart on the reserve day from scratch. The gods must be crazy but the final was rained out twice with a total of 110.4 overs being bowled without any result and hence the trophy was shared by India and Sri Lanka.

In the cloudy month of September, the Champions Trophy returned in 2004 to haunt the marketing men of the world. It was a much-maligned competition by now and the fans had come to sense it too. The stands were empty and England was busy with its hectic season of football. It did receive a final lift in the last overs of the final when Ian Bradshaw and Courtney Browne launched a late attack on England to win the tournament. The mini revival of West Indian cricket garnered some attention in the media and saved the competition many blushes.

The 2006 Champions Trophy saw no sub-continent team reach the semi-finals which was a first after the 1975 World Cup when it was hosted in India. The tournament was plagued by rain once again as the final was decided by the Duckworth Lewis method. The tournament saw some of the lowest totals in the tournament’s history and many of the games were one sided. It was as if the tournament was jinxed. The next edition that was supposed to be played in 2008 had to be postponed an year as the proposed venue, Pakistan, was unacceptable to most teams due to security concerns. It was eventually played in 2009 in South Africa and was made a once in 4 years event like the World Cup.

The ICC meanwhile has been trying to accommodate the upsurge that T-20 cricket has been. There have been radical doubts regarding the future of Test cricket in the wake of its popularity to counter which ICC has been proposing a Championship for each of three formats of the game. The Test Championship that is supposed to be the great brainchild of the ICC is set to replace the Champions Trophy which is currently enjoying it’s glum swan-song.

It is difficult to put a finger on why the Champions trophy failed excepting the individual failures of the events. The current concept of the 2013 edition that is to bring together the best ODI teams for a short span of time makes for an exciting contest but then how is it different from the World Cup? The ICC has been unable to justify these elements and hence perhaps scrapping the competition is in the best interest of everybody. One can only hope that the new calendar with which the ICC is coming will be cautioned with the history of this event.

A World Test Championship is indeed a long due idea and it remains to be seen if it can be implemented successfully. One might not be wrong in saying that not many people will miss the Champions Trophy or the Knockout tournament or whatever it is that it’s called.