I didn't expected Namibia to lose to Nepal in ICC Cricket World Cup League Two 2019-23, especially with Sandeep Lamichhane embroiled in the rape controversy. Namibia needs another 7 points to overtake Oman in the points table. They have only 5 matches left now. And that means that they need to win at least 3 games, with one more as draw or tie. Nepal doesn't have much of a chance to qualify to the next stage. Although they have 11 more matches remaining, they are at 6th place with just 20 points.

During yesterday's match, Namibia made a massive total of 285 and still lost it. Michael van Lingen had his highest score in an ODI, while Sandeep Lamichhane took three wickets for Nepal. In return, Kushal Bhurtel and Rohit Paudel scored the runs for Nepal and chased down the target with relative ease. The absence of David Wiese was a negative for Namibia, but they can't expect him to play all these unimportant matches when so many franchise T20 leagues are going on. Ruben Trumpelmann of the other hand took 3 wickets.

Previously televoting had an equal weight as the jury vote and then the political considerations of the jury will not have too much impact on the final results. But they changed the format for voting several times in the last 5-6 years, and now the jury vote has a higher weightage. Even the televoting seems to be having a bias. Check the voting numbers below, and you will find that "friendly" countries (for example, Moldova/Romania, Cyprus/Greece, Ukraine/Azerbaijan) get more votes compared to "unfriendly" countries. So not always, the best song gets most points.

No matter how good a team is, they can't guarantee winning matches 100% of the time they play. No one expected that Brazil would lose to Croatia, but it happened as a result of the combination of several adverse factors. I still believe that Brazil had the most skilled players and better team balance compared to other teams during Qatar 2022. From round of 16, it is knockout phase and no one can actually predict the outcome of the matches with guarantee. Croatia had a great day and didn't had anything to lose and eventually they won the match. That said, I didn't found too many negatives in the team strategy for Brazil, or the team balance and bonding.

UEFA is such a tough confederation and almost all the teams competing there are quality teams. I posted that Serbia is one of the strongest teams, because they topped their respective group in the UEFA qualifiers (out of the group of 5 teams, they managed to finish ahead of Portugal and the Republic of Ireland). But if you look at the rankings, then they are much below other teams such as England and France (Serbia is currently ranked #29). Anyway, IMO Serbia is a strong team and Brazil easily got past them without much difficulty.

OK.. In that case my bad. All the best for Tara Norris. I watched her during the Fairbreak Invitational T20 and she performed really well during the tournament. And I am quite surprised that none of the Thai women even got registered in the auction. Thailand is the strongest associate side at this moment in women's game and it is quite surprising that none of the franchises even considered their players. Apart from Thailand, Netherlands and Nepal are also quite good in women's cricket. Hopefully the WPSL will offer some of these players with contracts.

Unless there is rain, the match may get completed by today itself. Zimbabwe are struggling at 15/2, and need another 162 runs to avoid innings defeat. And 64 overs remain in today's play, which should be enough for the West Indian bowlers to take the remaining 8 wickets. Craig Ervine maybe able to delay the inevitable for a while, but their playing XI doesn't have any other experienced batsmen. Even if rain interruption occurs today, two more days remain and I don't really think that Zimbabwe can save this match. And there are hardly any positives for them to take away from this series as a whole.

Oh.. OK.. so that is the case here.

Amazon has an absolute monopoly in terms of e-commerce, and therefore they are not going to care even if the profits go down for a year or two. I am 100% sure that the so called loss is a tactic from them to lower the tax bill. It is their competitors who are going through losses now, as a result of monopolistic policies from Amazon. The misuse of monopoly by Amazon has made the lives of their competitors miserable and many of them had to shut down. Fortunately here in India, we have a strong competitor (Flipkart) who just refuses to lose to Amazon.

First of all, it will be wrong to compare these two countries in the first place. Pakistan's population is more than 10 times higher than that of Sri Lanka, and their diaspora population itself may be larger than the total population of Sri Lanka. The problem with Pakistan is that they are unable to convert their large market to revenues in the cricket domain. Media rights revenues are around 1% of that in India, due to a variety of reasons - regulations on advertisement, content-sharing rules and low cable TV penetration. In these aspects, Sri Lanka ranks higher than Pakistan.

Zimbabwe hasn't done much to justify their test status during the last one or two decades. Their performance have been on constant downslide ever since Andy Flower and Henry Olonga rebelled during the 2003 World Cup, which triggered the flight of players to Australia and England. Now the question is how the ICC can keep the annual fund allocation to Zimbabwe ($12 million per year, or $96 million in total for the 2015-23 cycle) much higher than that of teams such as Scotland and Netherlands, who have performed consistently better with 1/20th of the funds that Zimbabweans receive.

There are 5 teams and each of them can have 7 overseas players. So there is room for a total of 35 players. That means that 5 players can still be hired. And there is some confusion regarding Isabelle Wong. She represents England, but has dual citizenship of Hong Kong as well. Mumbai Indians claim that they can classify her as associate player (and thereby include another 4 overseas players in their playing XI). But she has never represented Hong Kong. Right now, only one player can be described as associate player (Tara Norris of United States of America).

Well.. let the players take the decision. For some players, winning an Olympic medal for their country would be one of the highest priorities. But for some others, playing for the club is more important. The current eligibility criteria (U-23 plus 3 senior) is well suited here, since it gives enough room for those senior players who have an Olympic ambition. And this criteria has resulted in some of the African countries winning the gold medal. Nigeria won the gold in 1996 and Cameroon in 2000. So in general, the changed eligibility criteria have been beneficial for the globalization of football.

Pakistan may get loans from some of the international agencies, as talks are going on. The case with Sri Lanka was much worse and that country ran out of petrol and diesel, and there were people waiting to fill their vehicles for weeks. Similar to the case with the IPL (which is the major revenue generator for the BCCI), PSL has gradually become a revenue earner for the PCB. Sethi don't need to do anything special. Before his departure, Rameez had already finalized the revenue sharing deal with the franchises and entered in to a very competitive media rights deal with PTV Sports and A Sports. There will be a steady flow of revenue, and Sethi just need to sit back and watch while funds flow in to the PCB accounts.

Back in 2016 and 2020, the pollsters underestimated GOP support. In both cases, GOP won more electoral college votes, than those predicted by the pollsters. But the situation changed completely in 2022. During the midterms, GOP lost 2-3 senate seats which they would have easily won. For the United States House of Representatives elections, I was expecting the GOP to win 240-250 seats and they ended up with just 222 (a bare majority). And then we had all the drama with Kevin McCarthy's speaker election. I am not getting too excited about GOP's chances in 2024. At this point, if the party is united then they have a 50% chance. That gets reduced to almost nothing, if there is infighting.

BTW, Harris is no longer the no.2 for Democrat nomination:

I really don't know why the Sportsbooks want to allow betting on these matches, where there is no oversight from the ICC or the law enforcement authorities. Cricket already has a match fixing problem and these little known leagues make it much worse than it should actually be. Here is one of the recent examples:

https://emergingcricket.com/news/limassol-gladiators-excluded-from-european-cricket-series-cyprus-in-match-fixing-probe/

The European Cricket Network (ECN) claims to have formed an anti-corruption unit to look in to the match fixing allegations, but I am noticing very little improvement. Irrespective of whether there is improvement or not, I would urge everyone to stay out from making bets on these matches. BTW, check this article as well:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/two-arrested-as-police-bust-cricket-betting-ring/articleshow/76882916.cms?from=mdr

LOL.. what a match? No one expected that the outcome would be any different, but to their credit Al-Hilal gave Madrid a run for their money. I was expecting a one-sided match, but this one turned out to be another competitive final (similar to the FIFA world cup final in Qatar). At one point, Real was leading by 4-1 and everyone wrote off Al Hilal. But they came back strongly with goals from Luciano Vietto. Eventually the Saudi team lost the match, but they have a lot of positives to take away from this final.

Real Madrid takes home $5 million in prize money, while Al Hilal would be receiving $4 million as the runners up. Teams that are ranked 3rd and 4th will receive $2.5 million and $2 million respectively, while everyone else except Auckland City will receive $1 million. Auckland City got beaten by Al Ahly in the first round, and therefore they will receive only $500,000.

Some of the Saudi Professional League clubs have good overseas players representing them. I am talking about clubs such as Al Hillal and Al-Ittihad. But clubs like Al-Wehda doesn't have that luxury and whenever they play against teams like Al Nassr they go down by big margins. For Al Nassr, the next match is against another little-known club called Al-Taawoun. We can expect a big win on 17th February, when the two teams are going to meet. The local defenders are no match for a legend like Ronaldo. Already he has 4 goals from 2 matches. By the time this season of SPL gets completed, he may overtake Talisca to become the top scorer.

You could have created this thread before the tournament started. Now we are discussing about it in the main T20 cricket thread. The tournament started on 10th February, and you posted this thread two days later. Anyway, better late than never. Here in India, women's cricket has grown by leaps and bounds during the last few years and there is a very noticeable increase in audience and viewership for this edition (compared to the previous one). And India's win against Pakistan definitely helps to get the media attention as well.

We are almost mid-way through the group stage. As things stand, two among these teams - South Africa, Australia and Sri Lanka may qualify for the semi-finals from Group 1. The other group is much easier, and England and India may qualify from there. Indian women recently won the T20 U-19 women's world cup. Now they will be targeting to win the senior women's world cup as well.

West Indies already have a lead of 175 runs, and there is a good chance that they may not be required to bat again. Zimbabwe once again proved that they are competitive only when Sikandar Raza is in the team. But he is participating in the PSL, so can't rescue them this time around (BTW he played his last test match for Zimbabwe almost 2 years ago). My advice to Zimbabwe would be to restrict themselves in test format against teams such as Ireland. If they play against the tier-1 test nations, due to the gap in player skills the matches will turn out to be too much one-sided.

So far this series has served it's purpose to improve the personal stats of some of the players. Tagenarine Chanderpaul and Gudakesh Motie would be happy about what they have achieved so far. But the ICC needs to take in to account these mismatches. They need to decide whether Zimbabwe should be allowed to play in test format, against tier-1 countries.

If you compare the economic situation in Sri Lanka with that in Pakistan, you will admit that the Lankan are in a much worse situation. But that didn't prevented them from hosting the Lanka Premier League successfully a few months back. With the PCB, they already have an old and established league in the PSL. With the new revenue sharing model that was implemented last year by Rameez, if the tournament is conducted properly then the board can get a lot of revenues in the form of media rights and sponsorship. Flood and inflation will have an impact, but I am sure that they will get through.

Well.. I find this strange. We see these arguments only after Brazil got kicked out of the world cup (lost to Croatia during Quarter-finals). Till that point, Brazil was having the best odds for any teams and they were considered as the favorites to lift the trophy (Argentina's odds were much worse). No one was complaining about the team balance before the tournament started. And let's not forget the fact that they scored a big win in their opening match, against one of the strongest teams from the UEFA confederation (Serbia). Things somehow didn't worked out for them in the knockout phase. But I still don't want to criticize them for that.