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Did India have a distinct edge knowing the location of their T20 World Cup 2024 semifinal match? Rohit Sharma, the captain of India, didn’t believe there was. Former Indian batsman Sanjay Manjrekar had a different opinion.
“Clear advantage,” Manjrekar said on ESPNcricinfo’s Timeout show. “Rohit has to say that. He can’t say it was an advantage. India would’ve picked their side based on it. India’s problem has been semis and finals and when you know you’re playing in Guyana, if you’ve been wondering why they’ve got four spinners in their squad, this could be the reason.”
That judgement that “it didn’t seem right or fair” that India knew where they were playing was echoed by former England batter Nick Knight. A number of people, most notably Michael Vaughan, his former opening partner and colleague, appear to support this school of thought.
“Literally, it’s their tournament,” Vaughan said in the Club Prairie Fire podcast on Thursday. “They get to play whenever they want. They get to know exactly where their semi-final will be. They play every single game in the morning so people can watch them at night in India on TV.
“I get that. I get that money is a big play in the world of cricket. And I get that in bilateral series, but you would think that when you get to a World Cup, the ICC should be a little bit fairer to everybody. It shouldn’t be just India just because they bring a few quid in.
“As I said, bilateral, I completely understand it. But when you get to a World Cup, there cannot be any kind of sympathy or any kind of sway towards one team in the tournament. And this tournament is purely set up for India, simple as that.”
Knight questioned the ICC’s decision to have different regulations for each of the semi-finals, going one step further. In contrast to the India-England semi-final, which only included a 250-minute time extension and no reserve day, the Afghanistan-South Africa semi-final on Wednesday night was set to have a reserve day.
“I can’t quite get my head around why we’ve got to this point,” Knight said. “I thought watching the group stages, it could’ve been condensed. I thought they were elongating moments at times between games. And why can’t we play the final on Sunday? Am I oversimplifying this to give teams the extra day to travel? I wonder if we could’ve pushed it altogether a little bit more to prevent this situation from happening.”