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.
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In my post on the increasing role of technology in helping adjudicate close decisions in cricket, I mentioned three of them: the Hawkeye ball tracker (using multiple camera angles to track the path of the ball and predict its future trajectory), the Snickometer (that displays sound as an oscilloscope signal to show the sound if the ball struck anything), and the Hot Spot (that uses infra-red cameras to detect the minute amounts of heat generated when the ball strikes the bat or the person of the batsman).
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I have to apologize to regular readers of this blog who are not fans of cricket and are understandably mystified by the appeal of the game and wonder if I am going to talk about nothing else up to and during the cricket World Cup that runs from February 14 through March 29. This is going to be my last substantive post on it, at least until the tournament begins and I provide some brief comments on the games as they happen.
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The cricket World Cup runs from February 14 through March 29 and 14 nations have qualified for the tournament. The set of the top eight ranked cricket teams in the world have been stable for some time, although their positions within the top eight keep changing. Currently, the rankings are: Australia (1), India (2), South Africa (3), Sri Lanka (4), England (5), Pakistan (6), New Zealand (7), West Indies (8), Bangladesh, (9), Zimbabwe (10), Afghanistan (11), and Ireland (12). Unranked Scotland and the UAE round out the teams.
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I have been warming up for the cricket World Cup to be held from February 14 to March 29 by watching more games, so as to get up to speed on what the teams are like and what changes have occurred in the game since my youthful days of addiction to the game, and one thing that struck me was the increased use of technology, much of it for the better.
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The cricket World Cup tournament begins on Saturday, February 14 and will last until the finals on Sunday, March 29, ensuring that the cricket loving parts of the world will see a marked decline in productivity during that period. Australia and New Zealand are hosting the tournament. In the lead up to it, increasing attention is being paid to the issue of poor sportsmanship on the field, mainly in the form of ‘sledging’ where players on the field exchange barbs with the goal of unsettling opponents and waging psychological warfare.
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I have been bemoaning the poor sportsmanship that is everywhere visible and how it has also encroached the once-genteel world of cricket where ‘sledging’ and generally churlish behavior have become increasingly common. So it is a pleasure for me to report on an incident of good sportsmanship that I observed yesterday.
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I have been taking a vacation during the holiday period and spent a lot of the time watching cricket. I am not sure when it became the norm in sports to openly exult over victory and to taunt the opponents. Nowadays it seems routine to do fist pumps, finger pointing, and engage in other exaggerated celebrations over every single achievement. I know that Mohammed Ali made taunting an opponent part of his standard behavior and maybe he can claim the dubious credit for starting the practice.
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