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I wonder if WAGs really mind their men being on the road for so long. With the kind of travel schedule cricketers have, they must be chalk up more frequent flier points to get free tickets to Hawaii every year. Tendulkar probably has more points this year than the number of runs he's scored in his career. Why complain about being on the road when you're flying most of the time?
This dose of bad humour was needed to highlight the ridiculousness of the order of match allocation on the part of BCCI. I did a bit of research on the distance between the cities hosting the 7 ODIs. As per the current schedule, this is the distance (As the crow flies) between venues hosting consecutive matches:
Vadodara-Nagpur: 624 km
Nagpur-Delhi: 854 km
Delhi-Chandigarh: 238
Chandigarh-Hyderabad: 1496 km
Hyderabad-Guwahati: 1683 km
Guwahati-Mumbai: 2096 km
That's a grand total of 6,991 kilometres.
However, if the BCCI wanted to minimise travel time, they could have gone in with something like:
Hyderabad-Nagpur: 425
Nagpur-Guwahati: 1406
Guwahati-Delhi: 1460
Delhi-Chandigarh: 238
Chandigarh-Vadodara: 1004
Vadodara-Mumbai: 368
for a total of 4,901 kilometres, almost 2100 kilometres less than what they're traveling now. To put this into perspective, Delhi to Bangalore is 2,065 kilometres by road and google says it takes 1 day and 9 hours to cover that distance. It shouldn't be too hard for someone who is minting millions to come up with an efficient itinerary. If it is, just hire me and I'll take care of everything.
Chalking up Frequent Flyer Points
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4 comments:
Its a good topic, and something I noticed last year this time during England's tour. I actually came across it because I had written a script to grab the fixture from from cricinfo and then generate a tour on google earth, and I noticed England traveled more inside India than the intercontinental distance they traversed.
Looking at it from the admin's perspective, things to keep in mind are that maybe different associations host different (domestic) matches that have already been penciled in, and that some grounds are more likely to generate revenue on weekdays/weekends than others, and they have to keep a set of regional boards happy with the final itinerary.
Its not a unique BCCI problem though, when I generated the tours for India's tour of NZ and South Africa's tour of Aus (imagine the trips to and from Perth twice or thrice!) last year, there was a lot of room for optimization. The thing is since there is no real time crunch, the traveling salesman only has to worry that he gets to a destination, it doesn't have to be in the shortest duration.
Zapped how they had Mohali after Delhi, that's just a drive down. Ideally after Delhi, the Andamans.
And what about some high altitude sickness after the plains - it's time for cricket in Ladakh.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but some day the BCCI will join us.
Very good post and a really interesting topic
but Makek i feel they had the compulsion of holding matches on sundays only at Guwahati and Vadodara as both the stadiums don't have flood lights and obviously if the match is on any other day there would not be a decent telivision audience. now after keeping these two as set points we have to cram in the other matches into the schedule.All the other 5 games are not on Sundays hence the day night matches for maximum television audiences.
Add to that the fact the final match has to be in Mumbai for reasons known to all.
This is the best possible combo i could find with the conditions mentioned above
Guwahati - Chandigarh 1548 km
Chandigarh - Delhi 238 km
Delhi - Hyderabad 1259 km
Hyderabad - Nagpur 423 km
Nagpur - Vadodra 624 km
Vadodra - Mumbai 368 km
(keeping the dates on which the odi's are played as some considering the sunday effect)
A total of 4460! Anyhow the BCCI decides to have this itinerary for reasons known only to them! or maybe they dont give a damn about the players and they want only one thing !
Aditya, you came up with an even better itinerary. Makes one wonder why the folks in BCCI can't do it. Even if you have to work around state cricket associations, once you've chosen the 7 venues it shouldn't be too hard to get them to agree with the schedule you want. A couple of days here and there isn't going to alienate an association.
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