Recently, England's flamboyant batsmen Kevin Pietersen was seen complaning about the scheduling in the World Cup.
That made me wonder, if the scheduling was really that bad or not. If you see the gaps that England have between two matches, they are as follows: 4-2-3-4-5.
(Meaning 4 days between match 1 and 2, 2 days between match 2 and 3, and so on.)
Similarly, the following are the gaps that various teams get between their 5 matches:
India: 8-6-2-2-7
Sri Lanka : 5-2-3-4-7
Australia: 3-7-7-2-2
South Africa: 6-2-5-2-3
Looking at this, I feel the management hasn't done a great job. Australia, for example, have 7 days gap for two games, while next two have just 2 days gap each. Similar is the case with India.
But, England's scheduling looks perfectly fine to me. They have 3-5 days between each match except one. What that means is, that they will have good time to prepare and the gaps won't be too long either. Ideal really, because they can carry the momentum of a good start till the end of the group stage. What else do you really want ??
So, KP complaining is rather stupid. If somebody is to blame, then it is the ECB who decided to have this long Australian ODI series right before the WC. Besides, no one from Australia is complaining, in spite of having an even worse schedule.
It's the biggest tournament of the game, stop complaining and get on with it KP.
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I think it is very clear ECB and CA, in their drive to eek out every last penny that can be earned from this tour, scheduled 9 LOIs disregarding the fact that there is an equally lengthy World Cup to follow (and also that the public in Australia might get tired of so much cricket)!
ReplyDeleteThe core of the English squad has been there since late October 2010... so I can understand that Pietersen (and others as well) is bound to get frustrated just looking at another cricket schedule, even if his team has the best schedule in the tournament, like you pointed out!
they should plan three back to back ashes each followed up with 7 odi series in protest of world cup scheduling...
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