Improving the Cricket World Cup schedule

The cricket World Cup, which ended on Saturday with a resounding victory by Australia over Sri Lanka, has been rife with problems: low attendance caused by exorbitant ticket prices, the farcical end to the final as the umpires forced the players to continue in near-darkness, the horrifying decision to continue play without interruption following the murder of Bob Woolmer. In all these cases, the situation could have been handled better: ticket prices should have been lowered, the umpires should have known the rules, the ICC should have suspended play out of respect for Woolmer and to give players a chance to grieve.

But the biggest problem with the World Cup was entirely predictable. It went on for too long, with far too many meaningless game. Here's a rundown of the schedule: 48 matches over a month and a half, followed by two semi-finals and a final. 46 matches! That's only 15 fewer than the FIFA World Cup last year, which had twice as many teams participating. There was a month of games that involved almost no excitement or elimination; the structure of the Super Eights stage allowed teams like England, which was truly awful throughout the tournament, to maintain hope of advancing until the very end.

The length of the tournament was bad enough. It was made worse by the lack of balance between the Super Eights stage and the real show: the semifinals and finals. After spending a month playing 24 games to determine the top 4 teams in the tournament, even when it was clear from early on that Australia, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, and South Africa were the class of the tournament. Instead of quickly eliminating the obvious chaff, we had to sit through an eight-team round robin whose result was known weeks ago.

And after all that work, viewers were left with just three games that really mattered, three games between the top four teams in the competition. On a given day, any top team can beat any other team. The amount of luck involved in the final was only increased by the rain-shortened nature of the final between Australia and Sri Lanka. If you decrease the length of the game, you increase the possibility of crazy stuff happening (like Australia losing, even if they were clearly the best team).

So after taking a month to make absolutely sure that the top four teams made it to the semifinals, the ICC decided to make the semi-finals and the finals a crapshoot. A relative crapshoot, but a crapshoot nonetheless.

The tournament would have been far more engaging if the semi-finals and final were extended to best-of-three (or even best-of-five) series. Doing so would increase the likelihood of the best team winning and, more importantly, produce more games between the top teams in the competition. I'd much rather watch three games of Australia-Sri Lanka then two extra match-ups between mediocre sides.

So there you have it, ICC. Next time around, just get on with already. Shorten the preliminary stages and lengthen the elimination phase. You'll end up with better cricket and less boredom.

Teaching the Holocaust in UK schools

You may have heard that the UK has stopped teaching the Holocaust in its schools to avoid alienating Muslim students. There's an e-mail to that effect that's been going around, and it's been getting a bit of space in the blogosphere.

Headlines in the British press on the story included "No lessons on the Holocaust" (Telegraph) and "Schools drop Holocaust lessons to avoid offence" (Times). The version of the e-mail that I got claimed that "UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offended' the Moslem population which claims it never occurred."

This all seemed to be a bit unlikely, so I decided to look into the report that started the whole story: Teaching Emotive and Controversial History (pdf) by the Historical Association. The newspaper reports suggest that the problem of not teaching the Holocaust in schools was widespread throughout the country. The report itself says nothing of the sort.

"For example, a history department in a northern city recently avoided selecting the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework for fear of confronting anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils."

That's it. The investigators found a single school that chose not to teach the Holocaust to its students. Its possible, of course, that lots of schools that weren't studied made a similar decision. But in the absence of evidence showing that they did, it's tremendously irresponsible of the press to report a widespread problem that simply doesn't exist.

For more details on the situation and the real state of Holocaust education in the UK, you can check out Snopes and the Holocaust Education Trust.

There are a couple of things to be said about cases like this. Most obvious are boilerplate mutterings about how the media do an awful job reporting stories accurately and should be more responsible. This is a pretty standard complaint, with good reason: the press often dramatically overstates the conclusions of reports like these.

Potentially just as harmful, this story shows how powerful narratives can be and how people will eagerly grab onto any anecdote that confirms their view of the world. We're all guilty of this misstep. We see a story that confirms our biases and accept it without hesitation. We come across a story that challenges our viewpoint and we examine it more closely, looking for holes in the story that weakens its reliability. Within history, cultural historians are particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon as much of their work is qualitative and impressionistic; it is all to easy to brush aside those texts that don't fit cleanly into whatever narrative we've come up with.

In the case of UK schools teaching the Holocaust, the narrative that bought the story to prominence is pretty clear. It goes something like this: the rising tide of Islamofascism, backed up by terrorist acts like the September 11th attacks, is threatening the cultural fabric of the West. If it's not stopped, we'll end up under the yoke of mullahs, subject to Sharia, our women forced to wear burkhas.

Some rightwingers' response to Nancy Pelosi's recent trip to Syria provide another example of how this sort of thing happens. Faced with a picture of Pelosi wearing a headscarf in a mosque, the denizens of Little Green Footballs proclaimed things like "a lot more American women are going to be wearing headscarves if these knuckleheaded dhimmis re-take the White House in '08." Never mind that Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice have worn similar scarves when visiting mosques. If a Democrat appears in Muslim garb, there's only one possible conclusion: the downfall of western civilization.

Pre-existing narratives can have a powerful hold on how we filter and respond to the news. The solution lies not in abandoning narratives (an impossible task), but in adopting a greater degree of skepticism, both towards outrageous claims (the UK is no longer teaching the Holocaust!) and towards stories that fall too neatly into our preconceived notions of the world. Critically evaluating our own narratives brings us closer to the truth and helps develop a sense of intellectual humility, noble outcomes both.

Brian Lara

Brian Lara, one of the giants of modern cricket, announced his retirement from international cricket after the West Indies' victory yesterday against Bangladesh. A batting genius, he holds the records for most Test runs (11,953), the most runs in a Test innings (400 not out), and the most runs in a first-class innings (501 not out).

My interest in cricket came too late to see him in his pomp, so I've been restricted to reading about his greatest innings and watching compilations on YouTube. For my money, it doesn't get any better than his 153 not out as he led the tail home as the West Indies successfully chased 308 to defeat Australia. Nerves of steel.

Wedding invitations

One of the most common topics discussed on The Knot's discussion boards is invitations. Questions abound: who to list as the hosts, how to write out the date, whether response cards are necessary. People get really worked up over these things. At least twice a week there'll be a posting along the lines of, "Help! My printer needs the wording in an hour! Can someone write my invitation?" A lot of this stress is really unnecessary. People freak out over minor points of etiquette and could do well to just chill out.

Did you know that so-and-so "requests the honour of your presence" is only for church weddings? Did you know that you're supposed to spell it honour, even though it's pure affectation? I didn't. Now maybe I'm just a philistine that knows nothing about etiquette, but the very fact that so many people don't know about this sort of things means that the people receiving the invitation won't know about it either. Brides-to-be flatter themselves by thinking that guests will notice this sort of thing. And even if they do, chances are they won't care.

Did you know that you're never supposed to put information about attire on a wedding invitation? Requesting "Black tie," is, apparently, rude and presumptuous. Etiquette mavens insist that people will be able to gauge the appropriate attire for an event based on the location, time, and style of the invitation. But clearly people put things like "Black tie invited" on an invitation because guests don't know these things.

If people on wedding discussion boards aren't acquainted with the finer points of invitation etiquette, their guests won't be either. It's fine if you want to have traditional invitations, but it's really not worth stressing over whether your guests think less of you for requesting the pleasure of their company for a church wedding. They won't notice and they won't care. So don't sweat it.