Cricket’s World Cup will be an interminable slog in every sense. It began on Tuesday, 13 March; the final is still six weeks away (28 April). With only a month to sort out 32 bristlingly competitive teams, football’s World Cup is comfortably more user-friendly, while rugby’s version already has plans in hand to compress itself severely for the 2011 finals and so eradicate such laughable mismatches as 1995’s New Zealand 145 – Japan 17 or 2003’s Australia 145 – Namibia 0.

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