The demise of the Champions Trophy; a victim of the rise of T20

When India take on England in the Champions Trophy final on Sunday, it will mark the end of a short-lived and somewhat schizophrenic life for the tournament. In the end, the Champions Trophy was one event too many for a bloated cricket calendar that has no beginning and no end. With the call for a Test championship growing stronger, it was the obvious candidate for the scrap heap. Conceived by the ICC – then led by Jagmohan Dalmiya – in the late 1990s as a way to make money between 50-over World Cups, it lost its raison d’etre with the rise of Twenty20 cricket. The World T20 championship, held every two years, has supplanted it as a fund raiser for the ICC and the rise of T20 leagues around the world has not only further crammed the calendar, but given boards the opportunity to make more money than they could from a stray 50-over tournament that was beset by scheduling and format problems. [caption id=“attachment_895133” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The Champions Trophy never got the love it possibly deserved. Getty[/caption] The Champions Trophy didn’t even start out as the Champions Trophy. It began as the ICC Knockout tournament, a title more amenable to a WWE or boxing event. It was rechristened the Champions Trophy in 2002 but never fully fully settled in world cricket, in part due to the changing nature of the tournament itself. The first two editions were played in Bangladesh and Kenya as a way to spread the game. It has not been played outside a Test playing country since. The first two editions were straight knock-outs. You lost; you went home. Only eight games were played in 1998; just 10 in 2000. From 2002, the tournament was expanded to 12 teams and featured four groups of three in a round-robin format, with the top team in each group going through to the semi-finals. In 2006, it was the top six teams in the ODI rankings, plus two of the other four Test teams, who played a qualifying tournament, split into two groups. That’s when one-day cricket’s shorter, faster, more glamorous cousin came along. Once a million people gathered on the streets of Mumbai to welcome home India as World T20 champions in 2007, the die was cast. Cricket needed space for another world event. Played every two years until then, only one Champions Trophy was played over the next six years. The Champions Trophy took its present form in 2009, with the top eight-ranked ODI teams split into two groups of four and the irony is that it had finally evolved into the kind of tournament that everyone wished the World Cup would be – lean and competitive. As Osman Samiuddin wrote in the The National a few months ago: “This is a 17-day tournament, featuring only the top eight teams in the world; the 15 matches will be played in three venues and that is that. The last tournament, in 2009 in South Africa, was as lean as this one and played across only two venues, within driving distance of the other. Is this not what cricket wants?” Perhaps a surer sense of identity could have saved the Champions Trophy, but it was never going to match up to the status of a World Cup, for players or fans. No player ever said his career was incomplete without winning the Champions Trophy; no fan was heartbroken over his side’s failure to win the tournament. If India wins on Sunday, a million people will not line the streets of Mumbai to welcome home their conquering heroes. And that, as much as any other reason, is why this will be the last Champions Trophy we will see. List of Champions Trophy Champions 1998 – South Africa 2000 – New Zealand 2002 – India and Sri Lanka declared joint-winners (the final was rained out) 2004 – West Indies 2006 - Australia 2009 - Australia