Beats me. The popular conjecture is that - if a team gets too little rest in-between matches, players get tired and perform worse as the tournament progresses. But you don’t want too much rest either. If the brake between subsequent matches is too big, team loses momentum and might perform worse. So, ideally, each team wants to have some ideal amount of idle days in-between matches - not too much and not too little.

Whether this conjecture is true or false - I don’t know. Nor am I interested in proving it. What interests me is comparative analysis of rest days between subsequent plays for the participant teams.

I hand parsed the schedule for the group stage into a Clojure hash-map and calculated the gaps between subsequent plays for each team. After that, means, medians and variances for each gap series was calculated and plotted side by side for comparison. This was my first data analysis project with Incanter, yet I found it surprisingly easy to grasp. The whole thing took 45 minutes at best - from planning to production. Thanks to awesomeness of Clojure and Incanter.

Well, from the above analysis, I think it’s clear that Bangladesh does not get a schedule worse than most teams. So, the statement/hypothesis we were trying to proof has no definite basis.

But there are some rather interesting conclusions we can draw from the variance chart. Note the teams with lowest gap variance - these are the teams who make the most money for ICC, in terms of viwership earnings. Could it be? Well here’s my conclusion -

Think about it. Say, you were handed the job of creating a schedule. Also, your boss wants you to maximize profit with the schedule. If a fan favorite team drops early you lose viewership. So, you want to delay the eventual outcome of group stage for the fan favorite teams. You collect relative number of viewers/fans for each country and sort them in a descending manner. Take the team with most viewers and spread them out uniformly in the group stage. You take the next team and do the same. And so on.