Homeless underdogs Pakistan upset the odds by winning the ICC Champions Trophy, but all the excitement about the unlikely victory cannot hide the elephant in the room: If we are to rate sporting contests by closely-fought games, then the tournament was a dismal failure.
Here are the results of the three knockout games: Pakistan beat India by 180 runs, India beat Bangladesh by 9 wickets, Pakistan beat England by 8 wickets. That's three turkeys in a row.
The pool games were not much better. The closest saw Bangladesh beating New Zealand with 16 balls and five wickets to spare, and Sri Lanka chasing down India's 321 with seven wickets and eight balls to spare. No game came close to coming down to the last over, or the last wicket.
The 2015 Cricket World Cup was also a one-sided business, with the notable exception of a close semifinal between South Africa and New Zealand. Australia hammered India by 95 runs in the other semifinal, before easily chasing down New Zealand's paltry 183 in the final.
As for the quarterfinals: NZ beat WI by 143 runs; Aus beat Pakistan by six wickets with 16 overs to spare; India beat Bangladesh by 109 runs; and SA beat SL by 9 wickets with 32 overs to spare. Combine the knockout games from the last two major ODI tournaments and you have one close game in 10. Those are not good odds for a neutral viewer looking for decent entertainment.
There is something very wrong with a sport when the top teams get together and produce so many one-sided results. What, then, is keeping interest in the one-day game alive?
The obvious answer is that there are not many opportunities for a country to win a major team trophy. In which sports are India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or Pakistan world champions? It's tough to think of too many off hand. It's therefore worth rooting for the lads when they have a shot at bringing honour to your country.
But this masks a deeper problem whereby the actual viewing value of these games is poor: 90 percent of the time one team gets on top and stays on top. In T20 the problem is resolved by the fact that you can afford to lose one wicket every 12 balls and still bat out your innings. With games so short, chasing teams can turn tricky situations around with a few mighty blows from lower-order batsmen. No wonder T20 is so popular.
The 50-over game is facing pressure on other fronts too. The biggest issue is the endless string of bilateral series, totally devoid of context. Google the phrase: 'no context to ODI series'. You'll get around 8.8million results. The first one reads: "So, India have won yet another ODI series in Zimbabwe. It was one-way traffic from the moment the ODI series kicked off and it made for awful television."
That sums up the problem. And to make matters worse, T20 is proving to be a second front, as draining to the game as Russia was to Hitler. Besides, aren't two versions of cricket enough: Tests for traditionalists and T20 for everyone else?
The ICC Champions Trophy was meant to reinvigorate the game, but instead it exposed its inherent weakness. Many believe the ODI format is dead. But if it must be revived, here's a suggestion: an annual knockout tournament for the four top-ranked ODI nations. That's right - no automatic entry for the Test-playing nations. This will give those endless ODI series some context. You play hard over the year to ensure you're ranked in the top four.
A second fix is to take a leaf from the American sports playbook. Knockouts should not be decided by one-off games. Give teams three games to show their class. As mentioned above, of the last 10 major knockout cricket matches, only one was close. Could the problem be that with so much riding on one game, players panic and collapse under pressure?
A three-match series would encourage freer play and result in better cricket and closer games. It would also reward better teams, who would have a chance to come back from an uncharacteristically poor showing.
The annual tournament could be decided by two semifinals series and one finals series - all best of three. This would mean a minimum of six games and a maximum of nine, with one team playing anything between two and six games. Throw in a rest day and you have a ten-day tournament held over two weekends - plenty of time to sustain and build interest.
Every year you have a chance of winning two trophies: League Cup for the top-ranked team, and Knockout Cup for the end-of-season tournament. You could add even more context to those ODI series by rewarding top-ranked teams with hosting rights for the end-of-season tournament.
If you need to have a World Cup every four years, that's fine. It could replace the annual knockout tournament for that year, with the semifinals and finals also being decided in a three-game series.
Just an idea. Use it, don't use it.
Powerhouse India are the one cricketing nation who can fix the ODI problem. Had they won the Champions Trophy, it would have been business as usual. Perhaps the loss will encourage reflection about a better system to determine ODI champions.