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What’s the point of Super Eights?

By Jonathan Liew 3 years ago, mid-September Add your comment below

It’s all been fairly entertaining stuff so far, then. Every major tournament needs a victory for the host nation, a close finish and an upset in its first week, and the World Twenty20 has delivered all of them four days ahead of schedule. Sixes have been hit, dances have been danced and grounds have generally been full enough for the local TV directors not to have to focus on the same group of fans for a whole match.

Still, it wouldn’t be an ICC event if you couldn’t complain about the format. And although this tournament is positively size zero in comparison to the World Cup, the organisers again seem worryingly keen to make sure absolutely everybody plays absolutely everybody. It will take twelve matches to reduce twelve teams to eight, and another twelve to reduce the eight to four. What’s wrong with quarter-finals? Most other sports seem to have them, and they work a treat.

Super Eights, while snappily-named and sound in theory, take all the sting out of a major tournament. At the last World Cup, around a third of Super Eight games, at a conservative estimate, were dead. That should reduce this time as a result of the lower number of matches played, but the ICC should take a long hard look at the Super Eights format. Keeping the games meaningful is surely more important than making sure India and Pakistan meet every time.

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9 Responses to “What’s the point of Super Eights?”

  • David Barry wrote:
    September 14th, 2007 at 6.29 am

    Firstly, there isn’t a Super Eights round at the Twenty20 Cup – they make two new groups of four. Twelve games is still longer than four quarter-finals, but it’s not as long as the 28 matches you’d have in a Super Eights round.

    Secondly, the problem with the Super Eights in the World Cup was that Bangladesh and Ireland made it through. I thought this was great, especially for Ireland, but they were never going to be able to do consistently well in an extended round like the Super Eights.

    The ICC deserves much of its criticism, but on the World Cup format, I think the problem lay with India’s and Pakistan’s poor cricket in the opening round, and England’s and the West Indies’ poor cricket in the Super Eights.

    (Remember that before the Cup started, most people thought that any of six or seven teams could win it! It looked like most of the Super Eights matches would be between serious contenders for the overall title.)

  • Marcus wrote:
    September 14th, 2007 at 7.05 am

    As an alternative to quarterfinals, another idea would be to put the quarterfinalists into two groups of four, where each team would play each other and the top two teams going through to the semifinals. Maybe they could keep India and Pakistan in separate groups?

  • Rusty wrote:
    September 14th, 2007 at 8.03 am

    Why not just the sudden death format? It would raise the stakes. Considering that there is not much time to think anyway in Twenty20, it would be in keeping with the game’s philosophy ( if not the ICC’s) rather than dragging it out to give “another chance” like the ODI and Test formats.

  • JII wrote:
    September 14th, 2007 at 12.32 pm

    I’m all for super 8s as it ensures that the teams that have played consistently goes through. But, maybe it doesn’t make sense for 20-20 which looks like a lottery, for now. And, is it a coincidence that India & Pak are in the same group? Maybe, the ICC thought it is too risky to wait for the teams to go to the super 8s before they meet.

  • Soulberry wrote:
    September 14th, 2007 at 3.01 pm

    Milking the cow for what it is worth.

    The last tournament I remember with a decent format was the ‘96 WC. Since then, money has always been a tantalizing temptation for ICC. That’s when tournaments began to get longer and meaningless.

    The quarters and semis system leading to a finals is what one is used to from sporting days of youth. Any sport…we didn’t hear of round robins till I was a late teen-ager and I really wondered why it was called robin and a round one at that! never could make much sense of it.

    Super 8’s and 6’s, and the stuff leading up to it, is a modification of that RR system.

    Either one has the quarters and semis and finals system or one adopts the ‘92 WC format where everyone played each other and the top four went ahead. That wasn’t too long a tournament.

  • Rich B wrote:
    September 14th, 2007 at 5.02 pm

    Marcus says why not have 2 groups of 4 instead of semi finals. That’s exactly what we’ve got in this tournament.

    Quarter finals would be better still, but maybe this 2x ‘Super 4s’ would be a better format for the next World Cup.

    Still, until the game expands until we’ve got at least 18-20 competitive teams, World Cups are always going to be a bit boring and predictable.

  • Rich B wrote:
    September 14th, 2007 at 5.04 pm

    Actually, I meant “2 groups of 4 instead of quarter finals”

  • Marcus wrote:
    September 15th, 2007 at 3.52 am

    Thanks for that Rich- I didn’t realise that’s what they’re doing until last night. I guess I really wrote it with the full World Cup in mind.

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    September 16th, 2007 at 4.09 am

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