T20 World Cup 2024 – Sanjay Manjrekar – India had a ‘clear advantage’ by knowing their T20 semi-final spot early

“Obvious advantage,” Manjrekar said on ESPNcricinfo’s Timeout show. “Rohit must say that. He can’t say it was an advantage. India would have chosen their side. India’s problem was in the semi finals and if you know you are playing in Guyana, if I was wondering why they have four players in their team, this could be the reason.”

“Basically, it’s their competition,” Vaughan said Club Prairie Fire podcast on Thursday. “They play whenever they want. They know exactly where their semi final will be. They play all the games in the morning so that people can watch them at night in India on TV.

“I get that. I get that money is a big game in the world of cricket. And I get that in international series, but you would think that when you get to the World Cup, the ICC should be a little bit fairer to everyone. It shouldn’t be just India because they bring in a few quid.

“Like I said, two countries, I understand it completely. But when it comes to the World Cup, there won’t be any kind of sympathy or any kind of influence on one team in the tournament. And this tournament is only for India, it’s that simple.”

“I don’t know why we got to this point,” Knight said. “I thought watching the group stages, could have been shortened. I thought they were increasing the time between games. And why can’t we play the final on Sunday? I’m making this too easy to give the teams an extra day to travel? I wonder if we could push it a little bit to prevent this situation from happening.”

Manjrekar asked the ICC to make it a level playing field, and not focus only on commercial gains.

“It’s the wrong way to do it,” he said. “I am talking about a very serious situation. In this game, we have put the cart before the horse very much. We are very happy to take it to the USA, New York. But what about the conditions? You have to focus on making the product high level and the playing field and look at the commercial benefits.

“We can’t just say ‘this is what the market wants, let’s do it for you’ because this is not a pure, commercial business. It has to be about high quality. [product].”