Let’s start by saying I am happy that Tendulkar got a world cup title under his belt. However, by looking at the matches, I see questionable patterns which make me think that the cricket world cup cricket 2011 was fixed. I am not going to say I am 100% sure the matches were fixed or I can provide evidence but after following many WC games closely, it feels like someone is controlling the matches with a remote control. I will point out few incidents here and might follow up with another analysis.
- Pak vs India semifinal-
- Tendulkar catch dropped: In professional cricket when was the last time the best batsmen catch was dropped 4 times in One day international?
- Misbah and Younus’s slow batting - Even Misbah will feel shameful after watching a reply of his batting and yes it was a batting pitch
- Powerplay - Pakistan didn’t take the powerplay when they had batsmen in hand. Not sure what they were waiting for in a do or die match when taking the powerplay early could give them some chances to win the game?
- Zaheer khan’a maiden 3 overs (final match): 3 maiden overs in a row in ODI at the start of the match, really?
- Slow start by Sri Lanka (Final match)-Thanranga 2 runs(20 balls), Dilshan 33 runs (49 balls) and Shangkkara 48(67 balls) and they are the top 3 Sri Lankan batsmen in this world cup. Their slow start made sure that Sri Lanka do not pass 300+
- Sri Lanka’s fielding – SriLanka is a superb fielding team but only in 2 matches there fielding was sloppy. Against Pak group match and against India in Final and both times they lost. Coincidents? Or both match were fixed? For fielding you may make mistakes 2-3 times but 5-6 players in the unit can’t go bad from good suddenly.
- Happy you and happy me: In this world cup no one was sore loser? Is not it funny? Pak, Sri Lanka tried but lost so they are happy. NZ is happy making to Semifinals. Bangladesh is happy beating England. England and WI is happy making it to qtfinals. India is happy being the champion. and SF didn’t mind keeping the chokers tag. At the end everyone is happy.
- Malinga’s bowling in the final – He seems to forget his inswinging Yorkers in the final match when it was needed but he had produced those on demand whenever needed in the tournament.
- Sri Lanka team selection and Shangarkkara’s role the final– Why would you bring 4 new players in the final match? (let’s say 3, 1 player was injured). Shangakkara’s mysterious mistake on the stamping when Gamvir was below 20 runs makes me wonders. Also instead of attacking India when they were down by 4, he helped Dhoni-Gamvir to settle down by having bowled by their 2nd layer bowlers.
- England performance- I didn’t get their game. They play really hard against top teams but they lost again Ireland and Bangladesh. There player were not charged enough against low ranking team in WC? Or is it because of betting buddies?
- SF the best balanced team – When they were looking so good, they were out and lost to mediocre NZ. What? If they play current NZ team outside WC, they will win 10 out of 10 games.
- ICC – when everyone is talking about match fixes in this world cup and even some of the Indian fans after the end of the WC, ICC vows to investigate ticketing process. Bravo. If you perform a google search on ‘world cup cricket 2007 match fixing’ you won’t get much but please do the same on 2011.
- Betting trend- An easy way to get some clues if the WC is fixed or not is to follow the betting trend in every questionable game. Any journalist can dig deeper into this and do an analysis and provide us if there is any correlation between match by match situation with the live betting trend. But will we see any in-depth writing on this. Probably not. This cricket betting world is controlled by mafia. I don’t think they will like it.
- Bangladesh win over India in 2007- I believe because of lost revenue of this match in 2007, everyone wanted to make sure this does not get repeated again. And because of this WC was fixed.
As a cricket fan I just want to know the truth so that if we are going to WWE era of cricket, I will follow it like a WWE fans. Are we not observing WWE like matches in cricket now? For some reason (sorry to my Indian friends) it felt like India was given the cup instead of winning the cup whenever they were in trouble help was given them to get out of the bad situation. Also on another note when Indian board will stop thinking about money and offer their neighboring country Bangladesh a tour in their land, I will show some respect to the new “world cup champion”. Come on we are waiting for 11 years for a tour. Until then shame on ICC and shame on India for being the winner of a successful money making WC. This is solely based on my opinion and may be the result of watching the games in the middle of night after night :)
