VC the slogger
PlanetCricket Forever
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2010
So this goes back to 2014, when just fresh from watching Germany beat Argentina at the end of an exhilirating FIFA World Cup I thought to myself when if ever we would ever get to see something similar for our beloved sport cricket. Well, the ICC put paid to those wishes by announcing their decision to contract rather than expand the most prestigious cricketing event to 10 teams post the 2015 World Cup, a decision I still call one of the most short-sighted and greed driven in the history of any sport of decent standing. Frustrated obviously, I began to put together hypothetical scenarios in my mind where we'd have qualifiers for each continent à la football and then a 32-team World Cup. I wasn't alone in this as @Aislabie also began his WC qualifiers around that time which were extremely fun to parttake in and inspired me to attempt my own version for the 2019 World Cup. I did rather well there and ran everything except for the World Cup itself, owing to reasons ranging from me going broke and the having to rebuild everything from scratch in my life such as a new business, and not to mention my passion for fitness which turned into an all-time high to the point where I was juggling boxing, athletic training, MMA, weightlifting all throughout the week in addition to laying the foundations to my new venture. I don't regret not running the World Cup here one bit as it proved beneficial in the long run for everything else in my life which wouldn't have been possible had cricket leagues not taken a backseat for a while.
Anyways, it's 2025 now and despite coming a long way since then I still can't quite resist the itch to get it done right this time for a change while I still can (so long as my old laptops still hold out anyways), and so that's exactly what I'll be doing here. My original idea wasn't to simply run a single World Cup edition like the 2019 one, but rather to run an All-Time Cricket World Cup featuring EVERY country to have ever taken our sport seriously or to have played it at the bare minimum to generate a scorecard at the very least. Why all-time you may ask, well it's because in the current scenario the result will be only too predictable given the shallow pool of talent outside of the established Test-playing nations to the point where it's quite reduntant to think of a winner other than one from the so-called 'Big Three' hegemony of Australia, India and England. But when you bring back the likes of Bart King, Ole Mortensen, Viv Richards, Carst Posthuma, George Headley, IL Bula etc to name a few to their respective nations, even those nations can no longer be taken lightly especially after you further sweeten the pot by relaxing eligibility rules to the extent where anyone with the right birth, residency, ancestry, passports, marriage or any such links becomes eligible too. Rather similar to my 2019 WC if those of you who were around that time can recall, but on a much much grander scale where no one - not even a team like Argentina or Mozambique can be taken lightly with a potential banana skin pretty much everywhere, just like I envisioned way back in 2014 when I daydreamed of a cricketing tournament to rival the competitiveness of international football.
Going all-time has also enabled me to throw up certain nations considered long extinct in the world of cricket who can prove a genuine threat here, which shall all be revealed in due time as I don't want to hand out too many spoilers already. This will also allow me to share the stories of the nations that became a victim of cricket's imperial and racist past, where cricket got a more than good head start on sports like football, rugby, baseball etc but were ultimately kept out by the shitestorm of a governing body coughed up by that white supremacist Abe Bailey who did little except lick England, Australia and South Africa's arses. Cricket could have easily had 120+ strong member nations today all competing well against each other if not for these short-sighted men who ruined any chance of spreading the game outside the confines of the British Empire. But alas, it is what it is.
Despite all this we may get the same old winners even here, or we may not, but they'll have the fight of their lives just trying to get there so whichever team emerges victorious will have truly deserved it in my eyes. I ran the 2019 WC qualifiers to the best of my ability, ran the Olympics for several seasons in the process learning much about the lesser known countries and people here still call the latter my best league, but this was always my dream league idea that I never got a chance to run until now.
Another area this will differ from my 2019 WC+Qualifiers is that I will be running this in the story-league format, which will allow me to get things moving at my own pace without having to wait unnecessarily long or having to compile piles of statistics for managers until the very end of a tournament which should ideally speed things up as this is an extremely ambitious project with a very high number of teams and matches being played overall. Although, I might change my mind regarding accepting managers later if I'm able to get as far as the actual World Cup. For now it will be much appreciated if those of you viewing take an active interest to follow some of the teams progress, and you may also give your ideas and suggestions regarding anything on the teams you are interested in following in the thread once this commences properly. Enough of my rambling now, let me show you how this is going to work:
Continental Zone | Direct slots | IC playoff spots | Teams |
|---|---|---|---|
Africa | 7 | 1 | 29 |
Asia | 8+3 | 2 | 32+3 |
Americas NSC | 5 | 0 | 20 |
Caribbean | 6 | 1 | 22 |
Europe | 14 | 1 | 38 |
Oceania/Pacific | 3 | 1 | 9 |
Inter-Continental playoffs | 2 | - | (6) |
Total | 45+3 | 6 | 150+3 |
So basically, a total of 153 countries overall will part-take in the entire story of which 150 will participate in the qualifiers of their respective continental zones. India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have been excluded from the qualifiers by lieu of being appointed host nations for the All-Time Cricket World Cup which will follow FIFA's most recent format of 48 teams. As cricket's most populous region and one where even the least important matches are capable of generating a decent crowd I could think of no other region, and the fact that previous Cricket World Cups in this region have produced more upsets than any other and also nullified Australia's invincibility to a certain extent also counted in their favor. But first things first, we have the qualifiers to deal with starting with the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, Americas North/South/Central (NSC), Africa, Oceania/Pacific and lastly the Inter-Continental playoffs where teams that fail their regional qualifiers by a narrow margin get a second chance at qualfying for the World Cup finals.
The formats for each qualifier shall differ based on team count among other things, but this time I will not be including the knockout format to eliminate as many lesser teams as possible like I did in 2019. It took me more than 11 years to make the all-time player lists of these countries and to finally start this, and I plan to cherish every single team as they participate in their quest to conquer the all-time landscape. I don't know what the future holds in store but this could very well be my last great league idea as I have nothing else really planned in my mind following the conclusion of CL XXI and LAB XII; 13 years is a long time to be invested in any one thing and I would love to walk off into the sunset as far as leagues are concerned with a big one in the bag such as this. So I only ask you wish me luck and follow this thread!
