Filed under: Cricket, Media, World Cup
It probably seems a bit churlish to deliberately go looking for something to moan about at the Cricket World Cup. A clunking mess it might be, sprawled over three calendar months, but it's already stolen a march on the football version of last year - that 676-run thriller between England and India ensures the tournament already has one more memorable match than Fifa's total letdown last summer. There are also five or six teams with legitimate claims on the title - compare and contrast that to Spain's cakewalk in South Africa. And at some point there's going to be a spectacular hundred/meltdown by Shahid Afridi. What's not to enjoy here?Still, this thing lasts for a month and a half, and if we don't find something to b***h about, we'll all get awful cramp in the mouth from smiling. The one big complaint seems to regard the plethora of meaningless matches in the opening rounds. While its true that there's not much drama in watching New Zealand bowl Kenya out for 69, whether that's a justifiable moan is moot. Getting shot of the four guaranteed places for associate and affiliate members at the 2015 World Cup is a poor show. It smacks of old-school colonialism. It hinders cricket's development in its second-tier nations. It gives their national teams little to play for. And it denies four teams and their players their time in the spotlight.
So most of the associates' matches are unlikely to offer much in the way of entertainment? Well, so what? Since when did cricket have to grab the attention all the time? It's sad that one of the joys of Test cricket - the option not to concentrate, allowing play to go on in the background as you talk to friends, read the paper, or fall unconscious after overdosing on Pimms - is rarely applied to the one-day game. You can watch Sri Lanka roll over Canada with the same intensity you'd afford an attritional second day, second session of a Test between England and Zimbabwe at Trent Bridge, zoned out in a sun-and-booze-induced stupor, with barely a clue nor a care as to what's going on. It's not too much of a hardship, this.
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Instead, let's get disproportionately irritated by something which is, on the face of it, trivial: the on-screen graphics. Tabs of information running along the bottom of the screen in greyish blues, the design appears to have been cribbed straight from an early 1990s Microsoft spreadsheet, a look of accountancy chic that conveys nothing of the verve of a festival of cricket held in three of the most vibrant and colourful nations in the world. Adding to the staid corporate image is the ICC Cricket World Cup logo in the corner, and just in case we've missed the point, the text "ICC Cricket World Cup" repeatedly flashed along the bottom of the screen.
It's the latest example of the growing and frankly unwelcome trend to aggressively apply corporate branding to major international sporting tournaments. Football is, of course, leading the way here: during the last World Cup, the television stations couldn't reshow footage of so much as a misplaced pass without the legend "FIFA" being flashed up as a two-second interstitial ahead of the replay. All this sort of attention-seeking achieves is to remind the irritated viewer that the event they were watching wasn't really a South African one at all, in the same way Germany's World Cup wasn't really German; instead it belonged to a nomadic tribe from Switzerland, who pitched up and declared the place a temporary autonomous state known as Fifaland. Russia's next; don't hold your breath for on-screen graphics in Cyrillic. Now the ICC are pulling the same trick in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka too, making sure everyone watching knows who's running the show. It would have been nice to see an Indian, or Sri Lankan, or Bangladeshi take on on-screen presentation, but everything's rendered in ICCFONT, the most popular character set in ICCWORLD, instead. In many respects, it no longer makes much difference where major sporting events are held, such is the hegemony of presentation. (And let's not even start on what's happened to Formula One over the years.)
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Source: http://www.fanhouse.co.uk/2011/02/28/icc-cricket-world-cup-england-india/
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