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A rollicking tournament

So the Champions Trophy has brought upset after upset. My pre-tournament semi-finalists would have been Australia, India, South Africa, and Sri Lanka. Two of these teams are nearly out after today's results and India (unless they can bring about a very quick turnaround) will join them on the sidelines tomorrow. And on current form, it looks like an England-Pakistan final is a decent chance. Some tournament the bookmakers must be having :-)

But its made for riveting watching, almost like the football world cup where one bad match can prove super costly for fancied teams. And I agree with the scribes who say that the cricket world cup should follow this format too. In fact, the format they had for the '83 and '87 World Cups was perfect. The top eight teams in two groups playing each other twice (to reward consistency) and then semis and a final. The only tinkering I would do is to make the finals best-of-three.

Anyways, to go back to this tournament its come at a great time for ODIs and showed that they still have a place. The other gratifying thing is how its shown that teams in world cricket today are really closely matched and anyone can beat anyone on a given day. Now if there was a full-strength West Indian team here, it would have been even more intriguing. For me though, the biggest surprise has been England. Their attitude most of the time seems to suggest they don't care about the shorter formats of the game so to see how positively they've played is really nice, especially given they don't have Flintoff and Pietersen. Imagine if they were around to play instead of Bopara and Wright in today's XI (for example). If they can keep this energy and pay a little more attention then they have a decent chance in the 2011 WC. Having said that, they'll probably promptly crash out at the group stage in that tournament :-)

As for this one, all bets are off and I'm making no more predictions for the semis, just hoping that there's good cricket through the rest of it!

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