Cricket's crazy Champions Trophy
Super Over 20, 21 February 2025
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Ball 1
How excited are you for the Champions Trophy?!
I know, I know. You aren’t.
Australian (and I suspect, English, New Zealand and South African) sports fans mainly fall into two categories:
1. Those who are not interested in the Champions Trophy
2. Those who don’t know the Champions Trophy is on - but if they did, would not be interested.
A small, third group of ardent cricket fans does exist - and if you subscribe to this newsletter you might be in it - who are at least a bit interested, but it is hardly the Ashes or a world cup.
I can tell you a group of fans who do care though: passionately, zealously.
You might be thinking Indians, Pakistanis or Bangladeshis. Sure, but they’re not the answer.
I am referring to people from Afghanistan.
The other day, I released a TikTok, trying to predict the result of every match.
Even in a short (15-match) event, the prospect of getting them all correct is extremely remote - not quite as remote as in American College basketball’s March Madness, in which Warren Buffett once offered a prize of a billion dollars to any employee who could pick all 67 games successfully - but still almost impossible.
As it happened, although I give Afghanistan a decent chance in each of their three matches (against South Africa, Australia and England), I ended up predicting they would lose each one.
It was my honest, earnest opinion and I didn’t think further about it . . . until the TikTok went crazy.
It has surged past a million views in 40 hours - and most are Afghans.
I have received thousands of comments, usually (but not always!) politely telling me how little I know about cricket and how certain they are that I am wrong. And thousands of Afghans have followed me - just, it seems, so they can remember me in order to remind me how wrong I was after each Afghan win.
I have been on social media for 18 years and have never experienced anything like it. I might be wrong, but my current opinion now is that even India cannot match the level of passion for their national cricket side that Afghans have.
This causes me to have two contradictory thoughts:
1. It is wonderful: a nation that has endured so much deserves to have some joy and if they are getting this through the sport I love most then it is delightful.
2. The ban on the Afghanistan women’s team needs to be ended and the International Cricket Council should be leading the way. Until this occurs, the joy that the men’s team brings must always come with an asterisk.
Ball 2
Let’s be honest, the format of the Champions Trophy is farcical; it would not happen in any sport except cricket.
I won’t comment on the political situation that has seen India playing all their games in Dubai, in the UAE, rather than in the host nation, Pakistan. I will confine myself to the sporting side of it.
Here is an incomplete list of things wrong with this tournament’s format:
1. Instead of playing in Pakistan like the other seven teams, India gets to play at a neutral venue. In the 2023 World Cup in India, Pakistan played India in India - and, naturally, encountered an extremely partisan home crowd. India will not have to deal with this in their upcoming match against Pakistan.
2. India will play every match on the same ground, including in the knockout stages, (if they qualify). Dubai’s conditions are different from Pakistan - India has thus been able to pick 15 players for Dubai, not having to even think about Pakistan conditions.
3. So, hypothetically, if Australia meet India in the final, Australia will most likely have played four matches in Pakistan and will then have to head over to Dubai conditions with zero preparation, to face an Indian squad handpicked for such conditions and with four matches in them under their belt.
4. Good luck if you are a fan planning on flying in for the final. You won’t know if you’ll be heading to Pakistan or the UAE until the last moment. Great fun to be had with tickets, flights, accommodation, visas and the like.
5. Even the official website can’t keep up. Note how the second semi-final is set down for Lahore: I can promise it won’t be in Lahore if India come second in their group (and are thus ‘A2’)!
Of course, without India, cricket would be a minor global game. And I have great affection for India and for Indian cricket fans.
But cricket has to find a better way of doing things than this.
Ball 3
Even aside from the this edition’s peculiarities, the Champions Trophy is a strange event.
It keeps on getting cancelled and reinstated, ODI cricket is an almost forgotten format and, in Australia - with games going through the night and only being shown on Amazon Prime - most people will never even know it was on*.
Yet for all that, I can’t help looking forward to it.
The competition format helps - a cut-down version of a FIFA world cup and indeed, the identical format to the first two men’s cricket world cups: two groups of four, each team plays three matches (one each against the others in their group), the top four go through to semis and then the winners into the final.
It’s simple and fast (18 days!) and pretty much every game will matter. Compare that to the most recent 50-over world cup in 2023, which stretched for six weeks had no fewer than 48 games!
The state of Australia’s depleted squad has been well documented, especially the absence of Hazlewood, Cummins and Starc. Australia looked awful in their 2-0 thrashing by Sri Lanka, but who knows - potentially the flat Pakistan wickets might help them, and players like Fraser-McGurk and Short who have been struggling might find them to their liking.
Australia’s pool games: (Sydney/Melbourne/Hobart time)
England: Saturday 22 Feb, 8pm
South Africa: Tuesday 25 Feb, 8pm
Afghanistan: Friday 28 Feb, 8pm
* (Amazon Prime is offering a free 30-day trial, which will cover the length of the tournament. If staying up all night is not feasible, the ‘minis’, the modern algorithmically generated highlights packages are pretty good: 15-20 minutes and you see most boundaries and all wickets. I am not being paid by Amazon to say this - but, obviously, if they want to pay me, I will say yes!)
Ball 4
Struggling for a reason to care about the Champions Trophy?
Well, if you are an Australian fan, maybe I have one for you: it is one of only two trophies that the Aussie men’s team do not currently hold.
Australia are World Cup and World Test Championship holders.
And Australia holds the trophy in all nine bilateral Test series in which it takes part.
All that is missing from a complete dominance of cricket is the Champions Trophy and the T20 World Cup. If Australia win the Champions Trophy and successfully defend their bilateral trophies against West Indies, England and New Zealand in the coming months, they will have an opportunity to play for it all in the next T20 World Cup, which is in India and Sri Lanka in February and March 2026.
Probably a long shot - but it would be pretty cool and something never before done.
Now for a trivia question. Can you actually name the nine bilateral Test trophies that Australia plays for? (Nine, not eleven, given we have yet to ever play Ireland or Afghanistan in Test cricket).
Obviously, against England it is the Ashes. And I will also reveal that there is no named trophy for Australia’s Test series against Bangladesh or South Africa - the latter a bit strange, given that South Africa is our second oldest opponent. Someone suggested the ‘Cronje-Warner Trophy’ in the comments to one of my TikToks, which I found a touch amusing.
So, can you name all seven? I confess I could not get Zimbabwe! Answers below.
Ball 5
I was asked an interesting question this week.
Before I tell you what it was, here is a hypothetical for you:
With Cummins, Starc and Hazlewood not available, Australia’s pace bowlers for the Champions Trophy are Nathan Ellis, Sean Abbott, Spencer Johnson, Aaron Hardie and Ben Dwarshuis.
Let’s imagine that somehow those five were also rendered unavailable: who would you choose in their stead?
Did any of you choose Scott Boland?
That was the question I was asked: why is Scott Boland not in the Champions Trophy squad? It took me by surprise and I had to confess I had not considered him at all - and I suspect the selectors did not either.
The more I thought about this, the more puzzling I found it.
Much is naturally being made of the absence of Australia’s big three quicks. And the fact that Bumrah is missing from India is - again, naturally - being held up as a big blow to their chances.
But Boland, the player whose record actually compared favourably to Bumrah’s during the summer, and who took 10 wickets in the Sheffield Shield match just finished, is completely forgotten.
So I looked at the numbers - and to my surprise, Boland’s List A record is relatively modest.
His economy rate is worse than any of the quicks in the squad (albeit only by a small margin) and his average is second worst. I think his performance in the 2023 Ashes might also have crushed whatever small chance he might have had to add to his total of 14 ODIs - all of which were in 2016. The ease with which England handled him on flat wickets with a well spread field did not bode well for one day cricket.
Nevertheless, I still think it is an intriguing question. It is fascinating to imagine how he might have gone with the new ball in Pakistan with that metronomic accuracy and just enough movement to be deadly . . .
We will never know.
Ball 6
Have you heard of Corey Rocchiccioli?
(By the way, it’s pronounced ‘rokk-uh-CHOHL-i’, with the last bit rhyming with Kohli).
Many of you will have, for his reputation is steadily growing. If you have not, allow me to make you aware of this most interesting 27-year-old spinner.
I say ‘most interesting’ because he is an offspinner from Perth of all places - arguably the hardest spot to bowl offspin on the planet.
I can think of Bruce Yardley as another prominent WA offie - and his record was pretty decent to be fair - but, (excluding his brief comeback in 1989/90) he retired over 40 years ago. If there have been others, they do not come to mind.
The WACA (which is where WA still play) is famous for pace and bounce, not spin.
As an example, here are the WACA records of Australia’s two most prominent recent spinners:
Shane Warne 37 wickets at 36.5 (Test) and 56 wickets at 36.0 (First class)
Nathan Lyon 15 wickets at 48.0 (Test) and 29 wickets at 40.9 (First class)
To date, the 27-year-old Rocchiccioli has 60 first class wickets at 24.1 at the WACA.
This looks impressive but it got me wondering - has the WACA become more spin-friendly recently? So, because I am a thrill-seeker, I went through the 17 first class matches Rocchiccioli has played on the WACA and looked at the collective record of all other spinners in those games:
Rocchiccioli: 60 wickets for 1,445 runs at an average of 24.1
All other spinners: 53 wickets for 2,096 runs at an average of 39.5
Clearly, the WACA has not become spin friendly. Instead, Rocchiccioli has found a way to use overspin to exploit the breeze and the bounce, as he outlines in the first few seconds of this clip.
His record away from the WACA is not as good - 48 wickets at 36.3 - but even so, 36.3 for an offspinner in Australian conditions is still respectable.
All told, he has 108 wickets at 29.5 at an impressive strike rate of 57.4. He was player of the match in the Shield Game at the Gabba that ended on Thursday, leading WA to victory over Queensland with 7/52 and 2/27, and must be in the mix for Test selection in the short-to-medium term.
He’s one to watch!
Answers to trivia question:
1. England: The Ashes
2. West Indies: The Frank Worrell Trophy
3. India: The Border-Gavaskar Trophy
4. New Zealand: The Trans-Tasman Trophy
5. Pakistan: The Benaud-Qadir Trophy
6. Sri Lanka: The Warne-Muralidaran Trophy
7. Zimbabwe: The Southern Cross Trophy