The Cricket World Cup (officially known as the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup) is an international championship of One Day International (ODI) cricket. The game’s governing body, the International Cricket Council, organizes the event every four years, with preliminary qualification rounds leading up to a final tournament. The tournament is one of the most watched sporting events in the world and is considered the “flagship event of the international cricket calendar” by the ICC.
The first World Cup was hosted in England in June 1975, with the first ODI cricket match being played just four years earlier. However, a separate Women’s Cricket World Cup was held two years before the first men’s tournament, and a tournament involving multiple international teams was held as early as 1912 when a tri-nation tournament of Test matches was played between Australia, England and South Africa. The first three World Cups were held in England. Since the 1987 tournament, hosting has been shared between countries under an informal rotation system, with fourteen ICC members hosting at least one match in the tournament.
The current format involves a qualification stage, which takes place every three years, to determine which teams qualify for the tournament stage. In the tournament phase, 10 teams, including the automatically qualified host nation, compete for the title at the host nation’s venue for about a month. In the 2027 edition, the format will be changed for an extended 14-team final.
A total of twenty teams have competed in twelve editions of the tournament, with ten teams competing in the recent 2019 tournament. Australia has won the tournament five times, India and West Indies twice each, and Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and England once each. The best performance of the non-full-member team came when Kenya reached the semi-finals of the 2003 tournament.
England is the current champions after winning the 2019 World Cup. The next tournament will be held in India in 2023 and the next World Cup in 2027 will be jointly held in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia.
History of Cricket World Cup
The first international cricket match was played between Canada and the United States, on 24 and 25 September 1844. However, the first test match to be played was between Australia and England in 1877, and the two teams contested the Ashes regularly in the following years. South Africa was admitted to Test status in 1889. Representative cricket teams were selected to tour each other, resulting in bilateral competitions. Cricket was also included as an Olympic sport at the 1900 Paris Games, where Great Britain defeated France to win the gold medal. This was cricket’s only appearance at the Summer Olympics.
The first multilateral competition at the international level was the 1912 Trilateral Tournament, a Test cricket tournament held in England between the then three Test-playing nations: England, Australia, and South Africa. The event was not a success: the summer was exceptionally wet, dampness made playing on the uncovered pitch difficult, and attendance was low, attributed to a “cricket glut”. Since then, international Test cricket has generally been organized as bilateral series: a multilateral Test tournament was not organized until the Trilateral Asian Test Championship in 1999.
. The number of countries playing Test cricket gradually increased with the addition of the West Indies in 1928, New Zealand in 1930, India in 1932, and Pakistan in 1952. However, international cricket continues to be played as three-, four- or five-day bilateral Test matches.
In the early 1960s, English county cricket teams started playing a shortened version of cricket that lasted only for one day. One-day cricket in England grew in popularity with the introduction of a four-team knockout competition known as the Midlands Knock-Out Cup in 1962 and the inaugural Gillette Cup in 1963. A National Sunday League was formed in 1969. The first one-day international was played on the fifth day of the rain-interrupted Test match between England and Australia in Melbourne, to fill the available time and as compensation for disappointed crowds. It was a forty-over game with eight balls per over. The success and popularity of domestic one-day competitions in England and other parts of the world, as well as early one-day internationals, prompted the ICC to consider hosting the Cricket World Cup.
The inaugural Cricket World Cup was held in 1975 in England, the only country at the time able to put forward the resources to stage such a large event. The 1975 tournament began on June 7. The first three events were held in England and were officially known as the Prudential Cup after the sponsor Prudential plc. The matches were 60 six-ball overs per team, played during the day in the traditional format, with players wearing white crickets and using red cricket balls.
Eight teams participated in the first tournament: Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan and the West Indies (then six Test nations), Sri Lanka, and a composite team from East Africa. A notable omission was South Africa, who were banned from international cricket due to apartheid. The tournament was won by the West Indies, who defeated Australia by 17 runs in the final at Lord’s. West Indies’ Roy Fredericks became the first batsman to take a hit wicket in ODIs in the 1975 World Cup final.
The 1979 World Cup saw the introduction of the IC Trophy competition to select non-Test playing teams for the World Cup, with Sri Lanka and Canada qualifying. 92 to hosts England in the final