March Madness

If you don't know what the NCAA basketball tournament is like - and if you're not American, that's quite understandable - you have the opportunity to find out this week on internet radio. If, on the other hand, you don't know anything about the cricket World Cup and would like to find out, well, if you're not in one of the participating countries you're out of luck.

Today it was the luck of the Irish which escaped me, as cricket minnows Ireland pulled off a near-miraculous tie against degraded former cricket power Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe seemed to have it easily in hand, but the Irish took a flurry of late wickets, including, apparently, a runout of the last man on the final ball of the 50th over. This luck escaped me because no one has bought the rights for even internet radio broadcasts of the World Cup here in France, so I only know about the match from reading about it.

The ICC is a monopoly which tries to maximize its short-term interests to the detriment of the sport. It's a disgrace to the sport of cricket that this supposedly world-wide event is blacked out even from radio and internet radio coverage in much of the world, which is not the case for a university league event in the U.S.