West Indies beat Australia. Format: Two qualifying groups of four, playing each other once in 60-over matches; top two in each group progressed to semi-finals; 15 matches in all.
West Indies beat England Retaining their Title. Format as 1975.
Format Two groups of four, as in 1979; this time, though, each team played the others in its group twice, not once, to determine the four semi-finalists. As a ploy to reduce the chance of elimination by the weather, it was a good one, even if June wasn't wet and only three of the 27 games went into a reserve day anyway. For the first time, non-Test grounds were used.
Format As in 1983 but, due to the shorter daylight hours on the subcontinent, games were 50 overs per innings, not 60. There was an attempt to cheer up disappointed crowds by staging a third-place play-off between Pakistan and India, but the star players demanded too much cash.
Format This was the Cup that thought it was a league. All played all in a qualifying round that went on for ever. It was fair, but about as exciting as the Nullarbor Plain. The good news was that South Africa joined in for the first time, following the end of apartheid.
Format Two qualifying groups of six: each team played the other five in its group to determine the quarter-finalists. In other words, it took 30 matches to eliminate Zimbabwe and the three minnows, then seven more to reduce the remaining Test nations to one winner.
Format Not so much tinkering as a complete revamp. The 12 entrants were split into two groups, and the top three in each group went into the Super Six, carrying with them the points they had earned against the two teams who had also qualified from their group. They then played the qualifying teams from the other group, creating a final all-played-all league table, with the top four going into the semi-finals. Confused? Most people were.
Format: The organisers all but ignored the lessons learned from 1999 and persevered with the Super Six format, although they tried to even things out by tweaking how points earned in the group stage were carried through. It was still to prove fundamentally flawed as boycotts of matches in Kenya and Zimbabwe, on political and safety grounds, skewed the points so much that Kenya reached the semi-finals courtesy of wins over Bangladesh, Canada and Sri Lanka.
Format: The lessons of 1999 and 2003 were learned and so the Super Eights qualifying was from four groups of four. However, the advertising men were left gawping as India and Pakistan failed to make it through the first round, Bangladesh and Ireland taking their places. While that thrilled the neutrals, it caused a flurry of "never again" chart from Asia and Dubai. The only points carried forward were the ones against the other qualifiers from the same group, which at least should have given the second round some meaning.
Pakistan Beat Sri Lanka
England Beat Australia
The ICC learnt its lessons from the 2007 World Cup and reverted to the format used in the 1996 World Cup, where the knockout stage began with the quarter-finals. In 2007, teams were split into four groups of four each but the experiment backfired when India and Pakistan bowed out in the first round, considerably robbing the tournament of commercial and spectator interest. The latest format, though, gave the teams more chances of recovering from a poor start. Teams were split into two groups of seven each, every team playing the other in the group once. The top four from each group would qualify for the quarter-finals. Initially, the four subcontinent teams were due to host the tournament, but the terror attack on the Sri Lanka team bus in Lahore in 2009, and the deteriorating security situation, led to Pakistan being dropped as a co-host. The matches were then shared between India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
West Indies beat Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka beat India
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