The World Cup starts on Saturday and in the days leading up to the event, each team has been playing two warm up matches. There have been some surprises. Yesterday lowly Zimbabwe trounced Sri Lanka. Two days earlier, Zimbabwe restricted New Zealand to a low score of 157/7 in a game that was halted because of rain, suggesting that this is a team to watch.

Meanwhile New Zealand easily beat South Africa, the team that I tipped to win the tournament and unranked Scotland easily defeated Ireland.

Elsewhere, teams performed pretty much according to my expectations. England easily beat West Indies and lost to Pakistan, and India lost badly to Australia while defeating Afghanistan.

Australia is the one team that has showed consistently good form so they must be feeling pretty confident.

It is true that these are just warm-up matches that do not count for anything and are being used by each team to try out players. But no team likes to lose and so these unexpected results suggest that we might have an exciting tournament with severe underdogs like Zimbabwe shining on the world stage. Given the turmoil in their home countries, it is quite amazing that Zimbabwe and Afghanistan have even got this far.