Cricket is an action packed game that gives a thrill to viewers. During the world cup tournament, no one can afford to miss the action. It is for this reason that we keep on providing you with necessary information on world cup. World cup is one of the biggest tournaments that every one of you loves to catch up. As world cup tournament is an important event, cricket world cup history is also mandatory to know intricacies of the game. It is the cricket world cup history that Stickiewicket acquaints you with, so as to give you a basic understanding of cricket world cup.
Cricket world cup history at our site informs you that the first ever cricket world cup was organized inEngland
Cricket world cup history gives a deep insight into the process of selection that was applied in the earlier times. This history also informs the fan like you that the first three tournaments were sponsored by Prudential PLC and that’s why these tournaments were called prudential cup. With the help of cricket world cup history available on this site, you will also get to know that the 1975 world cup saw the introduction of ICC trophy. Apart from cricket world cup history, you can also check out cricket news, online cricket games, ICC rankings, information on teams and squads, your favorite podcasts and many other things that help you to get everything in one go.
Cricket fans get to know information that Australians have been the most successful team in world cup, as it has won 3 world cup titles. No doubt that cricket world cup is one of the most fascinating tournaments ever; still a little bit hand-on information on cricket world cup history would help you in understanding the game of yester years. Relevant information is collected for fans, so that they can find the proper facts can be accessed without any hassles. The facts and details about world cup are provided for the betterment of fans and are genuine too.
Cricket world cup history at our site informs you that the first ever cricket world cup was organized in
Cricket world cup history gives a deep insight into the process of selection that was applied in the earlier times. This history also informs the fan like you that the first three tournaments were sponsored by Prudential PLC and that’s why these tournaments were called prudential cup. With the help of cricket world cup history available on this site, you will also get to know that the 1975 world cup saw the introduction of ICC trophy. Apart from cricket world cup history, you can also check out cricket news, online cricket games, ICC rankings, information on teams and squads, your favorite podcasts and many other things that help you to get everything in one go.
Cricket fans get to know information that Australians have been the most successful team in world cup, as it has won 3 world cup titles. No doubt that cricket world cup is one of the most fascinating tournaments ever; still a little bit hand-on information on cricket world cup history would help you in understanding the game of yester years. Relevant information is collected for fans, so that they can find the proper facts can be accessed without any hassles. The facts and details about world cup are provided for the betterment of fans and are genuine too.
* 1975 World Cup in England
* 1979 World Cup in England
* 1983 World Cup in England
* 1987 World Cup in India and Pakistan
* 1992 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand
* 1996 World Cup in India , Pakistan and Sri Lanka
* 1999 World Cup in England
* 2003 World Cup in South Africa
1975 World Cup in England:
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| Cricket World Cup 1975 |
Teams 8
Minnows East Africa, Sri Lanka (not a Test nation until 1982)
Innovations Not many, apart from the concept itself (there had only been 18 ODIs worldwide before this). Most teams still treated the matches as if they were truncated Tests - especially India, who played for a draw in the first game, responding to England's 334 for 4 with 132 for 3. Sunil Gavaskar batted through the 60 overs for 36 not out; a disgusted spectator dumped his lunch at the opener's feet.
Early running England romped their group games - the tightest was an 80-run victory over New Zealand. Favourites West Indies nearly came unstuck against Pakistan, but last pair Deryck Murray and Andy Roberts put on 64 to win. They then hammered Australia by seven wickets at The Oval, where Alvin Kallicharran's 78 included a memorable attack on Dennis Lillee. Glenn Turner hit two tons for NZ, including 171 not out v East Africa.
The semis Headingley served up a swinging, seaming paradise for England - but it was girthy Gary Gilmour (6 for 14) who did the damage as England tumbled for 93. Australia were reeling at 39 for 6 themselves before Gilmour joined Doug Walters and took them home. West Indies eased past NZ at The Oval with 19.5 overs to spare, thanks to another sparkling innings from Kalli (72).
The final It was midsummer's day (June 21), and Lord's needed all the available daylight to cram the match in. It eventually finished at 8.42pm. After Roy Fredericks trod on his wicket as he hooked Lillee out of the ground, Clive Lloyd took up the fight in memorable fashion, crunching 12 fours and two sixes in his 102, and the eventual 291 for 8 looked too hot for Australia. The early batsmen kept trying quick runs to Viv Richards; he kept running them out. At 233 for 9 it seemed over, but last pair Jeff Thomson and Lillee inched the Aussies to within 18 of victory before the fifth-run-out ended the fun.
Last hurrah Only Lillee, Thomson and Marsh of this great Australian side graced another World Cup. Elegant West Indian Rohan Kanhai bowed out of international cricket with a studied 55 in the final - he helped the rampaging Lloyd put on 149. Kanhai was a late squad replacement after Garry Sobers cried off injured. For England, the Packer-bound Amiss, Knott, Greig and Snow played their only World Cup, and skipper Mike Denness lasted only one more Test.
First hurrah One-day cricket itself - the five-day game had a fight on its hands after the first "festival of cricket" lit up the imagination. Of the players, Javed Miandad, just 18, made his international debut, and had Clive Lloyd caught behind at Edgbaston. Uniquely, he was also to play in the next five World Cups. Imran Khan took time off from captaining Oxford to play in the first of his five. Six of the West Indians also played in the next final (and Greenidge, Richards, Lloyd and Roberts in the one after that as well).
Not to be forgotten At the height of that last-wicket excitement in the final, Lillee slapped a Van Holder no-ball straight to Fredericks at extra cover. The crowd missed the call and rushed on, thinking the match was over. Fredericks tried another run-out, only to see the ball disappear into the horde. "Keep running," shouted Lillee to his mate. When order was restored, umpires Dickie Bird and Tom Spencer declared they could have two runs. "Pig's arse," cried Thommo. "We've been running up and down here all afternoon!" So they gave them three.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
The first World Cup, officially called The Prudential Cup, proved an outstanding success. Blessed by perfect weather, ideal conditions prevailed. Altogether fifteen single innings matches, each confined to 60 overs, were played in England between June 7 and June 21. There were a few one-sided contests among some tremendous and keenly fought struggles. The highlight came in the Final at Lord's where Australia and West Indies were in combat from 11am until 8.45pm when The Duke of Edinburgh presented the Cup to Clive Lloyd, the West Indies captain.
Eight countries took part, but unfortunately not South Africa. The Prudential put 100,000 in the kitty and the overall takings came to more than 200,000 with an aggregate attendance of 158,000. Lord's was packed for the final with 26,000 present and receipts, a record for one day, of 66,000. The winners received 4,000. Australia, runners-up, 2,000 and the losing semi-finalists, England and New Zealand, 1,000 each.
The profits from the competition were distributed: 10 per cent to the United Kingdom and 7 per cent to each of the seven other participants. The balance went to the inaugurators, the International Cricket Conference, to distribute at their discretion to the non-participating associated member countries, the International coaching fund and the reserve account for the promotion of the next International World Cup.
When the I.C.C. met in London towards the end of June member countries were invited to submit ideas for the next World Cup. India had already said that they were keen to act as hosts, but several members thought it was hard to beat England as the venue.
The main view for this reasoning was the longer period of daylight in England in June when 60 overs for each side can be completed the same day.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
Tony Cozier
The initial reaction on looking back at my original assessment of the inaugural World Cup was to cringe at its hyperbole.
It was, I wrote at the time, "perhaps the boldest and most ambitious innovation the game has known since the legalisation of overarm bowling". Yet, as we prepare for the eighth such tournament, more than a quarter-century on, it doesn't seem so outrageous after all.
Until the advent of limited-overs, single-innings matches in English domestic cricket in the 1960s, such a concept was simply impractical. A round-robin series of five-day Tests, even among as few teams as the six that then had Test status, was too time-consuming to contemplate.
It needed the development of the shortened version, with matches completed in a day, to give birth to the World Cup idea and the daring of International Cricket Conference (ICC) a body not usually credited with foresight to implement it.
They chose England as the venue, a questionable choice only as far as the unpredictable weather was concerned but best qualified by virtue of its tradition, its facilities, its manageable size and the presence of a large, cosmopolitan, immigrant population of passionate cricket followers.
They found a generous sponsor in the Prudential Insurance Company, which paid 100 000 for tournament naming rights. And they invited Sri Lanka, yet to reach their present exalted rank, and East Africa (a combination of club cricketers from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia) to take part along with the Test teams of the day (Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan and the West Indies).
With everything in place, they set the process in motion on June 7 with matches between England and India at Lord's and Australia and Pakistan at Headingley.
For the following two weeks, the success exceeded the expectations of even the most cock-eyed optimist.
One of the main ingredients for its triumphant run was the weather. It remained glorious, untypically British, right through. Not a single ball was lost to the elements.
A rousing final, at a packed Lord's in uninterrupted summer sunshine, was able to run until the final wicket fell at 8:41 p.m. on the longest day of the year as the West Indies completed victory by 17 runs over Australia after 118.4 overs.
Large, enthusiastic crowds thronged the six grounds for most of the matches. Thousands of joyous, enthusiastic West Indians, who transformed the Oval and Lord's into Caribbean carnivals with their drums and whistles, brought to the occasion a special excitement previously foreign to the game in England.
The World Cup had come to stay.
It has inevitably evolved in the interim so that the 2003 event in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya will be all but unrecognisable from what it was in that unforgettable English summer of 1975.
The innings will be restricted to 50 overs instead of 60. Fourteen teams bedecked in national colours will contest 54 matches at 15 different grounds in three countries over six weeks, many under lights, with white balls against black sightboards and on fields demarcated with a field-restricting area.
In the beginning, eight teams used the six main venues in England for 15 matches and got through the whole business in a fortnight.
Everyone dressed in conventional white and bowled with the red ball. The only markings were the popping and return creases. And lights were restricted to the scoreboards.
Yet a few tenets were immediately established that have remained constant.
One was that the best players remained the best players, whatever the length of the game.
Others were that partnerships were as crucial over one day as over five, and that tactics were, if anything, even more critical in the condensed version.
Above all, the value of fielding was repeatedly emphasised, especially in the final when the West Indies effected five run outs in their pulsating victory over Australia. Three were by Viv Richards, a dynamic 24-year-old athlete soon to become one of the greats of the game, who threw out three of the first four in the order.
Another certainty was also established. It was that, for all the inevitable scepticism of the traditionalists, the concentrated action of the abbreviated game made it hugely popular.
Aggregate crowds of 158 000 paid over 200 000 to watch the 15 matches, 26 000 of them at the Lord's final where gate receipts were 66 000, then a record for a one-day match.
If these figures and the prize money distribution of 4 000 pounds for the winners, 2 000 for the runners-up and 1 000 each for the beaten semifinalist appear laughably puny now, they were not to be scoffed at 26 years ago.
The West Indies had been justifiably installed as favourites and lived up to the bookmakers' confidence. Their strength lay in their all-round depth, their fielding and the experience that 11 of their squad of 14 had of the special demands of the limited-overs game from their seasons of county cricket.
They did have one scare, in the first round against talented but mercurial Pakistan when they squeezed home by one wicket with two balls remaining. That apart, they showed themselves palpably the best team.
In between the Pakistan thriller, they despatched Sri Lanka by nine wickets in 56 overs and, in a prelude to the final, beat Australia by seven wickets at the Oval, in the heart of London's pulsating West Indian population.
New Zealand proved no match in the semi-final, defeated by five wickets with as many as 19.5 overs remaining.
Their captain, Clive Lloyd, a destroyer in spectacles, set up victory in the final virtually on his own with a little help from Richards and his fielders.
His 102 from 85 balls was an exhilarating exhibition of power-hitting that saw the West Indies to 291 for eight from their 60 overs. He followed it with a containing spell of medium-pace bowling (12-1-38-1) that kept Australia in check as they were dismissed for 274.
The Australians were scheduled to play a series of four Tests against England following the Cup and their captain, Ian Chappell, made it plain that was their main focus. With limited-overs cricket still in its infancy back home, they were reportedly not keen on it. But, as Australians, they were less keen on losing.
The draw placed the West Indies, Australia and Pakistan in the same group that was completed by Sri Lanka.
Only two could advance to the semi-final and Pakistan, also filled with county professionals, were the unfortunate ones to miss out, even though they severely tested Australia and, by all that is logical, should have beaten the West Indies whose last two wickets put on 110.
Sri Lanka might have fared better with a more favourable draw, but endured three heavy defeats on their way out. They won a host of fans with their plucky batting that raised 276 for four against Australia, even after two of their batsmen had to be hospitalised after taking blows from the fiery Jeff Thomson. Their time would come.
England had the advantage of the less demanding group and coasted into the semi-final after sweeping all three qualifying matches.
They amassed 266 for six against New Zealand, 290 for five against East Africa and 334 for four against India, the tournament's highest total. The standard of their opponents only camouflaged their known weaknesses that were exposed in the semi-final against Australia when, on an appalling pitch at Headingley, they were routed for 93 by the left-arm swing and seam of Gary Gilmour (12-6-14-6) and lost by five wickets.
The second qualifier from the group, New Zealand, depended heavily on their captain, Glenn Turner, an established pro with Worcestershire.
He batted through the innings against both East Africa and India to become the only batsman with two hundreds in the tournament. When he failed against England and against the West Indies in the semi-final, the team couldn't muster 200 and lost comfortably.
India did run New Zealand close in their decisive first round match, but a semi-final place would have been an undeserving honour after they reduced their match against England, the showpiece opening at Lord's, to a farce.
They paid for the selectorial madness of omitting their left-arm spin wizard Bishan Bedi to be hammered around at 5.5 runs an over and made no effort to compete. Sunil Gavaskar, their finest batsman, epitomised their cynical attitude by batting through the 60 overs for 36 not out.
It took the sparkle of that ebullient cricketer, Abid Ali, to erase some of the shame with a thrilling, yet futile, all-round performance against New Zealand (70 and 12-2-35-2).
Africa's strongest team, South Africa, had placed itself beyond the pale of international sport by its policy of racial exclusion and Rhodesia, later to become Zimbabwe, was still governed by the illegal Ian Smith regime.
So it was left to the inadequate amalgamation of East Africa to represent the continent. Comprised of weekend club cricketers never before exposed to such international standards, they wereduly outclassed.
The competition was an unqualified success even before the final, but a remarkable match was a fitting climax.
"It might not be termed first-class," noted Wisden, the game's bible, "but the game has never provided better entertainment in one day."
It was a contest of intensity and incident that kept the crowd of 26,000 in a constant state of frenzy.
It produced Lloyd's outstanding individual performance and his vital fourth wicket partnership of 149 with the wily, 39-year-old Rohan Kanhai. There were uncharacteristic errors in the field by the Australians that contrasted with the brilliance of Richards and the other West Indians.
And an unlikely last wicket Australian partnership of 41 between the two feared fast bowlers, Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, produced the final dramatic twist.
The pair threatened to snatch an astonishing victory until wicket-keeper Deryck Murray's presence of mind, calmness of nerve and accuracy of throw, to underarm the stumps with Thomson out of his ground, formalised the result as Lord's was immediately engulfed by thousands of excited fans.
The famous old ground had never seen anything like it. It set a standard by which all subsequent finals would be judged and none has yet matched it.
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| Prudential World Cup 1979 |
West Indies retain their title
World Cup No. 2
Teams 8
Minnows Canada, Sri Lanka (not a Test nation until 1982)
Format As 1975
Innovations The minor teams emerged from a qualifying competition - the inaugural ICC Trophy, won by Sri Lanka. Australia handicapped themselves by selecting a largely unknown team (remember Graham Porter or Jeff Moss?) as their best players were still contracted to Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket. West Indies and Pakistan, fearing ructions at home if they fared badly, chose all their WSC players. By the following winter, peace had broken out and all the Packer men were back in the fold.
Early running West Indies topped their group with two wins and a no-result against Sri Lanka, who upset India by 47 runs at Old Trafford. New Zealand, with a strong hand of medium-pacers who could bat a bit, qualified with comfortable wins over Sri Lanka and India before running West Indies close (32 runs) at Trent Bridge. England breezed past Australia and bowled out Canada for 45, before pipping Pakistan, the other qualifiers from that group, in a low-scoring match at Headingley. The only century in the group games was Gordon Greenidge's 106* for West Indies v India at Edgbaston.
The semis Mike Brearley (53 in 115 balls) and Graham Gooch (71 from 84) held England's innings together after early wickets against New Zealand at Old Trafford. Chasing 221, John Wright (69 from 137) did a similar job before he was run out. NZ had lots of allrounders - but still fell nine runs short. West Indies ran up 293 for 6 at The Oval, but were sweating as Majid Khan (81) and Zaheer Abbas (93) shared a sparkling stand of 166. But Pakistan subsided to 250; the middle-order destroyer was Viv Richards, with 3 for 52. West Indies were in the final again.
The final It took a lot to upstage a brilliant Richards century, but Collis King managed it. In his finest hour (77 minutes, actually, but no-one was counting) King blasted 86 for 66 balls, clouting ten fours and three sixes. Richards ended the innings by walking across his stumps and flicking Hendrick into the Mound Stand for six: 286 for 9. In reply England's openers put on 129 - but too slowly, using up more than half the available overs. Brearley made 64 from 130 balls and Boycott 57 from 103. With Larkins at No. 7, it was a strong batting side ... but they had too much to do, as Joel Garner (5 for 38) zeroed in on the base of the stumps, and 183 for 2 turned into 194 all out.
Last hurrah Majid Khan's 81 in the semi-final - made under one of his father's old straw hats - was his last World Cup innings. It was farewell World Cup, too, for Asif Iqbal, who captained Pakistan in the first two competitions although he hadn't then skippered them in Tests. For England, Boycott and Brearley, Old and Taylor weren't there next time round. Apart from captain Kim Hughes and a handy-looking leftie (AR Border) the only Australian who resurfaced was fast man Rodney Hogg. Canada weren't seen again for 24 years, either.
First hurrah Croft and Garner joined Holding and Roberts in the champions' awesome attack. Greenidge and Haynes posted 106 together in the first match - the first of their 15 century stands in ODIs. Border (see above) played in the first of his four World Cups, as did Gooch, John Wright, and Kapil Dev.
Not to be forgotten England's unlikely bowling secret weapon was Geoff Boycott, bowling his little medium-pacers round the wicket, with cap reversed. He took 2 for 15 v Australia, and 2 for 14 at the death against Pakistan, when he lured Sikander Bakht into a brainless swipe while Imran Khan was winning the game at the other end. This persuaded England to pick four recognised bowlers for the later games. Boycott even took a wicket in the semi-final, but the plan unravelled in the final itself - the 12 overs England cobbled together from part-timers Boycott, Gooch and Larkins cost 86.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
The second World Cup, officially called The Prudential Cup, proved, like the first in 1975, a great success, and again West Indies carried off the title. Unlike four years earlier, it was not blessed throughout with blissful sunshine during the fortnight it was in progress - June 9 to June 23.
Nevertheless, the three Saturdays provided fine weather and there was only one bad period - June 13, 14, 15 - when not a ball could be bowled in the match between West Indies and Sri Lanka at The Oval. The ground at Old Trafford was also affected, but two days sufficed for England to beat Canada in a low-scoring match. Again eight countries took part, and from a cricketer's point of view it was a shame that once more South Africa were left in the cold. To fill the two remaining places, a separate tournament was organised among associate members of the International Cricket Conference. From this emerged Sri Lanka, who took part in 1975, and Canada.
The matches were confined to one innings of 60 overs for each side. No bowler was allowed more than twelve overs per innings and the umpires applied strict interpretation in regard to wides and bumpers to prevent negative bowling.
The Prudential Assurance Company put 250,000 in the kitty and the gate receipts from the World Cup came to 359,700, almost double the 188,000 for the first competition. The total attendance last summer was 132,000 compared with 160,000 four years earlier, the drop being almost entirely due to the bad weather. The surplus, distributed to the full and associate members of the International Cricket Conference, came to 350,000.
Prizemoney amounted to 25,900. West Indies, the winners, received the Prudential Cup and 10,000; England, runners-up, 4,000; Pakistan and New Zealand, losing semi-finalists, 2,000 each; and winners of group matches 500 each. There were also Man of the Match awards: 300 to Vivian Richards (West Indies) in the final, 200 each in the semi-finals, and 100 for the nominated player in each group match.
At their meeting which followed the World Cup, the International Cricket Conference agreed to make the competition a four-yearly event with the 1983 tournament again being staged in England. The first World Cup, officially called The Prudential Cup, proved an outstanding success. Blessed by perfect weather, ideal conditions prevailed. Altogether fifteen single innings matches, each confined to 60 overs, were played in England between June 7 and June 21. There were a few one-sided contests among some tremendous and keenly fought struggles. The highlight came in the Final at Lord's where Australia and West Indies were in combat from 11am until 8.45pm when The Duke of Edinburgh presented the Cup to Clive Lloyd, the West Indies captain.
Eight countries took part, but unfortunately not South Africa. The Prudential put 100,000 in the kitty and the overall takings came to more than 200,000 with an aggregate attendance of 158,000. Lord's was packed for the final with 26,000 present and receipts, a record for one day, of 66,000. The winners received 4,000. Australia, runners-up, 2,000 and the losing semi-finalists, England and New Zealand, 1,000 each.
The profits from the competition were distributed: 10 per cent to the United Kingdom and 7 per cent to each of the seven other participants. The balance went to the inaugurators, the International Cricket Conference, to distribute at their discretion to the non-participating associated member countries, the International coaching fund and the reserve account for the promotion of the next International World Cup.
When the I.C.C. met in London towards the end of June member countries were invited to submit ideas for the next World Cup. India had already said that they were keen to act as hosts, but several members thought it was hard to beat England as the venue.
The main view for this reasoning was the longer period of daylight in England in June when 60 overs for each side can be completed the same day.
Teams 8
Minnows Canada, Sri Lanka (not a Test nation until 1982)
Format As 1975
Innovations The minor teams emerged from a qualifying competition - the inaugural ICC Trophy, won by Sri Lanka. Australia handicapped themselves by selecting a largely unknown team (remember Graham Porter or Jeff Moss?) as their best players were still contracted to Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket. West Indies and Pakistan, fearing ructions at home if they fared badly, chose all their WSC players. By the following winter, peace had broken out and all the Packer men were back in the fold.
Early running West Indies topped their group with two wins and a no-result against Sri Lanka, who upset India by 47 runs at Old Trafford. New Zealand, with a strong hand of medium-pacers who could bat a bit, qualified with comfortable wins over Sri Lanka and India before running West Indies close (32 runs) at Trent Bridge. England breezed past Australia and bowled out Canada for 45, before pipping Pakistan, the other qualifiers from that group, in a low-scoring match at Headingley. The only century in the group games was Gordon Greenidge's 106* for West Indies v India at Edgbaston.
The semis Mike Brearley (53 in 115 balls) and Graham Gooch (71 from 84) held England's innings together after early wickets against New Zealand at Old Trafford. Chasing 221, John Wright (69 from 137) did a similar job before he was run out. NZ had lots of allrounders - but still fell nine runs short. West Indies ran up 293 for 6 at The Oval, but were sweating as Majid Khan (81) and Zaheer Abbas (93) shared a sparkling stand of 166. But Pakistan subsided to 250; the middle-order destroyer was Viv Richards, with 3 for 52. West Indies were in the final again.
The final It took a lot to upstage a brilliant Richards century, but Collis King managed it. In his finest hour (77 minutes, actually, but no-one was counting) King blasted 86 for 66 balls, clouting ten fours and three sixes. Richards ended the innings by walking across his stumps and flicking Hendrick into the Mound Stand for six: 286 for 9. In reply England's openers put on 129 - but too slowly, using up more than half the available overs. Brearley made 64 from 130 balls and Boycott 57 from 103. With Larkins at No. 7, it was a strong batting side ... but they had too much to do, as Joel Garner (5 for 38) zeroed in on the base of the stumps, and 183 for 2 turned into 194 all out.
Last hurrah Majid Khan's 81 in the semi-final - made under one of his father's old straw hats - was his last World Cup innings. It was farewell World Cup, too, for Asif Iqbal, who captained Pakistan in the first two competitions although he hadn't then skippered them in Tests. For England, Boycott and Brearley, Old and Taylor weren't there next time round. Apart from captain Kim Hughes and a handy-looking leftie (AR Border) the only Australian who resurfaced was fast man Rodney Hogg. Canada weren't seen again for 24 years, either.
First hurrah Croft and Garner joined Holding and Roberts in the champions' awesome attack. Greenidge and Haynes posted 106 together in the first match - the first of their 15 century stands in ODIs. Border (see above) played in the first of his four World Cups, as did Gooch, John Wright, and Kapil Dev.
Not to be forgotten England's unlikely bowling secret weapon was Geoff Boycott, bowling his little medium-pacers round the wicket, with cap reversed. He took 2 for 15 v Australia, and 2 for 14 at the death against Pakistan, when he lured Sikander Bakht into a brainless swipe while Imran Khan was winning the game at the other end. This persuaded England to pick four recognised bowlers for the later games. Boycott even took a wicket in the semi-final, but the plan unravelled in the final itself - the 12 overs England cobbled together from part-timers Boycott, Gooch and Larkins cost 86.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
The second World Cup, officially called The Prudential Cup, proved, like the first in 1975, a great success, and again West Indies carried off the title. Unlike four years earlier, it was not blessed throughout with blissful sunshine during the fortnight it was in progress - June 9 to June 23.
Nevertheless, the three Saturdays provided fine weather and there was only one bad period - June 13, 14, 15 - when not a ball could be bowled in the match between West Indies and Sri Lanka at The Oval. The ground at Old Trafford was also affected, but two days sufficed for England to beat Canada in a low-scoring match. Again eight countries took part, and from a cricketer's point of view it was a shame that once more South Africa were left in the cold. To fill the two remaining places, a separate tournament was organised among associate members of the International Cricket Conference. From this emerged Sri Lanka, who took part in 1975, and Canada.
The matches were confined to one innings of 60 overs for each side. No bowler was allowed more than twelve overs per innings and the umpires applied strict interpretation in regard to wides and bumpers to prevent negative bowling.
The Prudential Assurance Company put 250,000 in the kitty and the gate receipts from the World Cup came to 359,700, almost double the 188,000 for the first competition. The total attendance last summer was 132,000 compared with 160,000 four years earlier, the drop being almost entirely due to the bad weather. The surplus, distributed to the full and associate members of the International Cricket Conference, came to 350,000.
Prizemoney amounted to 25,900. West Indies, the winners, received the Prudential Cup and 10,000; England, runners-up, 4,000; Pakistan and New Zealand, losing semi-finalists, 2,000 each; and winners of group matches 500 each. There were also Man of the Match awards: 300 to Vivian Richards (West Indies) in the final, 200 each in the semi-finals, and 100 for the nominated player in each group match.
At their meeting which followed the World Cup, the International Cricket Conference agreed to make the competition a four-yearly event with the 1983 tournament again being staged in England. The first World Cup, officially called The Prudential Cup, proved an outstanding success. Blessed by perfect weather, ideal conditions prevailed. Altogether fifteen single innings matches, each confined to 60 overs, were played in England between June 7 and June 21. There were a few one-sided contests among some tremendous and keenly fought struggles. The highlight came in the Final at Lord's where Australia and West Indies were in combat from 11am until 8.45pm when The Duke of Edinburgh presented the Cup to Clive Lloyd, the West Indies captain.
Eight countries took part, but unfortunately not South Africa. The Prudential put 100,000 in the kitty and the overall takings came to more than 200,000 with an aggregate attendance of 158,000. Lord's was packed for the final with 26,000 present and receipts, a record for one day, of 66,000. The winners received 4,000. Australia, runners-up, 2,000 and the losing semi-finalists, England and New Zealand, 1,000 each.
The profits from the competition were distributed: 10 per cent to the United Kingdom and 7 per cent to each of the seven other participants. The balance went to the inaugurators, the International Cricket Conference, to distribute at their discretion to the non-participating associated member countries, the International coaching fund and the reserve account for the promotion of the next International World Cup.
When the I.C.C. met in London towards the end of June member countries were invited to submit ideas for the next World Cup. India had already said that they were keen to act as hosts, but several members thought it was hard to beat England as the venue.
The main view for this reasoning was the longer period of daylight in England in June when 60 overs for each side can be completed the same day.
 |
| ICC World Cup 1983 |
India stun the world
World Cup No. 3
Teams 8
Minnows Zimbabwe
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.
Innovations Umpires were told to apply a stricter interpretation of wides and bouncers. The result? More than twice as many wides per match as in 1979 (9.59 to 4.64). A fielding circle (actually an oval) was introduced, 30 yards away from the stumps. Four fieldsmen needed to be inside it at all times.
Early running England dominated Group A, beating Pakistan and Sri Lanka twice each, and New Zealand once. They were followed into the semis by Pakistan, who squeezed through by scoring 0.08 more runs per over than the Kiwis. In Group B, West Indies and India disposed of a disappointing Australian side and newcomers Zimbabwe. The performance of the round came from Winston Davis of West Indies, who demolished the Aussies at Headingley with a Cup-record 7 for 51.
The semis India's dark horses had been creeping up on the rails all tournament, and now they cantered unfussily past a below-par England. Yashpal Sharma and Sandeep Patil made light of a pitch which had undermined England's batsmen, and hit crashing fifties in a six-wicket win. West Indies strutted on, brushing aside Pakistan by eight wickets with more than 11 overs to go. They were helped by a display of Test-match patience from Pakistan's opener, Mohsin Khan, who scratched his way to an apologetic 70 off 176 balls. A lone boundary punctuated his 43 singles, and his team-mates succumbed to attempts to up the tempo at the other end.
The final In advance it looked like an anticlimax. It would surely be another big day for West Indies cricket, and no more than a big day out for the Indians. When India were strangled for 183, and Richards led West Indies to 50 for 1 in reply, Caribbean celebrations began. But then Madan Lal and Mohinder Amarnath - who finished their careers with a combined total of 103 wickets from 108 Tests - wobbled the ball around, and somehow took three wickets each to dismiss a disbelieving West Indies for 140. Upsets don't come much bigger.
Last hurrah It was an unhappy farewell for Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson and Rodney Marsh. Finalists in 1975, but also-rans in '83, they retired from international cricket a few months later. New Zealand's batting bedrock, Glenn Turner, played his last game for his country, and Bob Willis's creaking limbs didn't hold out much longer. It was Clive Lloyd's final World Cup too - there may never be a better chance to win three tournaments in a row.
First hurrah NZ's Martin Crowe, aged 20, announced himself on the World Cup scene with 97 in the tournament opener against England. There was a limited-overs debut for Abdul Qadir, in which he bamboozled NZ to the tune of 4 for 21, only to improve with 5 for 44 against Sri Lanka. For once he received a pasting from England (0 for 104 in two games).
Not to be forgotten In their first-ever Cup game Zimbabwe beat Australia by 13 runs, but even this looked commonplace after some chaos in Kent. Coming in to bat for India against Zimbabwe at a disastrous 17 for 5, Kapil Dev turned the tranquillity of Tunbridge Wells on its head by blasting an undefeated 175 out of 266 for 8, with 16 fours and six sixes. He put on a Cup-record 126 for the ninth wicket with Syed Kirmani, whose 24 not out was India's next-best score. Oh, and India won by 31 runs. Finally there was the mauling Martin Snedden took in New Zealand's opening match against England. With Allan Lamb in belligerent mood, his figures were an x-rated 12-1-105-2.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
The third World Cup, the last to be sponsored by the Prudential Assurance Company, began with two fine surprises, when India beat West Indies and Zimbabwe beat Australia in the opening round of matches, and ended with the greatest surprise of all, when India beat West Indies again, this time in the final at Lords. None of the eight sides had to make do without a victory.
The competition differed from its two predecessors in that in the preliminary groups the sides played each other not once but twice. This was partly to increase revenue but also to lessen the chances of a side being eliminated through having greater misfortune with the weather than its rivals. In the event, no sooner had the sides started to arrive in England for the 1983 World Cup than the rain, which had made the month of May one of the wettest on record, cleared away.
Of the 27 matches played, only three were not begun and finished in a day. Many were played in warm sunshine, and throughout the competition, from June 925, interest ran high. After losing their opening match, West Indies carried all before them until failing, for the first time, to win the final. Australia had a disappointing fortnight, and with Imran Khan unfit to bowl for them, Pakistan were a shadow of the side which had trounced India and Australia in the previous winter.
New Zealands main batting provided them with insufficient runs for a consistent challenge, while Sri Lanka, though they won their return match against New Zealand, were too short of bowling to be a serious threat. Zimbabwe, playing for the first time, having qualified as winners of the ICC Trophy in 1982, made a welcome contribution. Their side included several players with first-class experience, acquired when, as Rhodesia, their country played in the Currie Cup. Apart from beating Australia they gave West Indies a run for their money at Worcester.
Indias unexpected success (they were quoted at 66 to 1 before the competition began) came under a young and relatively new captain (Kapil Dev) and owed much to the presence in their side of three all-rounders (Kapil Dev, Roger Binny and Mohinder Amarnath) who, at critical moments, found enough in the conditions to help form an effective attack. Who would ever have thought before a ball was bowled that the leading wicket-takers in the competition would be the Sri Lankan De Mel and Binny, with his gentle medium-pace?
Each side received 60 overs. No bowler was allowed more than twelve overs per innings and, to prevent negative bowling, the umpires applied a stricter interpretation than in first-class cricket in regard to wides and bumpers.
The total amount of the Prudential Assurance Companys sponsorship was 500,000, and the gate receipts came to 1,195,712. The aggregate attendance was 232,081, compared with 160,000 in 1975 and 132,000 in 1979. The surplus, distributed to full and associate members of the International Cricket Conference, was in excess of 1,000,000, this being over and above the prior payments of 53,900 to each of the seven full members and one of 30,200 to Zimbabwe.
In addition to the Trophy and silver-gilt medals for each player, India received 20,000 for their victory. As runners-up West Indies won 8,000. The losing semi-finalists, England and Pakistan, each won 4,000. There were also awards of 1,000 to the group winners, plus Man of the Match awards (200 for the group matches, 400 for the semi-finals and 600 for the final).
At their meeting which followed the World Cup, the ICC asked for tenders, to be submitted by the end of 1983, from countries wishing to stage the competition when next it is held.
Teams 8
Minnows Zimbabwe
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.
Innovations Umpires were told to apply a stricter interpretation of wides and bouncers. The result? More than twice as many wides per match as in 1979 (9.59 to 4.64). A fielding circle (actually an oval) was introduced, 30 yards away from the stumps. Four fieldsmen needed to be inside it at all times.
Early running England dominated Group A, beating Pakistan and Sri Lanka twice each, and New Zealand once. They were followed into the semis by Pakistan, who squeezed through by scoring 0.08 more runs per over than the Kiwis. In Group B, West Indies and India disposed of a disappointing Australian side and newcomers Zimbabwe. The performance of the round came from Winston Davis of West Indies, who demolished the Aussies at Headingley with a Cup-record 7 for 51.
The semis India's dark horses had been creeping up on the rails all tournament, and now they cantered unfussily past a below-par England. Yashpal Sharma and Sandeep Patil made light of a pitch which had undermined England's batsmen, and hit crashing fifties in a six-wicket win. West Indies strutted on, brushing aside Pakistan by eight wickets with more than 11 overs to go. They were helped by a display of Test-match patience from Pakistan's opener, Mohsin Khan, who scratched his way to an apologetic 70 off 176 balls. A lone boundary punctuated his 43 singles, and his team-mates succumbed to attempts to up the tempo at the other end.
The final In advance it looked like an anticlimax. It would surely be another big day for West Indies cricket, and no more than a big day out for the Indians. When India were strangled for 183, and Richards led West Indies to 50 for 1 in reply, Caribbean celebrations began. But then Madan Lal and Mohinder Amarnath - who finished their careers with a combined total of 103 wickets from 108 Tests - wobbled the ball around, and somehow took three wickets each to dismiss a disbelieving West Indies for 140. Upsets don't come much bigger.
Last hurrah It was an unhappy farewell for Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson and Rodney Marsh. Finalists in 1975, but also-rans in '83, they retired from international cricket a few months later. New Zealand's batting bedrock, Glenn Turner, played his last game for his country, and Bob Willis's creaking limbs didn't hold out much longer. It was Clive Lloyd's final World Cup too - there may never be a better chance to win three tournaments in a row.
First hurrah NZ's Martin Crowe, aged 20, announced himself on the World Cup scene with 97 in the tournament opener against England. There was a limited-overs debut for Abdul Qadir, in which he bamboozled NZ to the tune of 4 for 21, only to improve with 5 for 44 against Sri Lanka. For once he received a pasting from England (0 for 104 in two games).
Not to be forgotten In their first-ever Cup game Zimbabwe beat Australia by 13 runs, but even this looked commonplace after some chaos in Kent. Coming in to bat for India against Zimbabwe at a disastrous 17 for 5, Kapil Dev turned the tranquillity of Tunbridge Wells on its head by blasting an undefeated 175 out of 266 for 8, with 16 fours and six sixes. He put on a Cup-record 126 for the ninth wicket with Syed Kirmani, whose 24 not out was India's next-best score. Oh, and India won by 31 runs. Finally there was the mauling Martin Snedden took in New Zealand's opening match against England. With Allan Lamb in belligerent mood, his figures were an x-rated 12-1-105-2.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
The third World Cup, the last to be sponsored by the Prudential Assurance Company, began with two fine surprises, when India beat West Indies and Zimbabwe beat Australia in the opening round of matches, and ended with the greatest surprise of all, when India beat West Indies again, this time in the final at Lords. None of the eight sides had to make do without a victory.
The competition differed from its two predecessors in that in the preliminary groups the sides played each other not once but twice. This was partly to increase revenue but also to lessen the chances of a side being eliminated through having greater misfortune with the weather than its rivals. In the event, no sooner had the sides started to arrive in England for the 1983 World Cup than the rain, which had made the month of May one of the wettest on record, cleared away.
Of the 27 matches played, only three were not begun and finished in a day. Many were played in warm sunshine, and throughout the competition, from June 925, interest ran high. After losing their opening match, West Indies carried all before them until failing, for the first time, to win the final. Australia had a disappointing fortnight, and with Imran Khan unfit to bowl for them, Pakistan were a shadow of the side which had trounced India and Australia in the previous winter.
New Zealands main batting provided them with insufficient runs for a consistent challenge, while Sri Lanka, though they won their return match against New Zealand, were too short of bowling to be a serious threat. Zimbabwe, playing for the first time, having qualified as winners of the ICC Trophy in 1982, made a welcome contribution. Their side included several players with first-class experience, acquired when, as Rhodesia, their country played in the Currie Cup. Apart from beating Australia they gave West Indies a run for their money at Worcester.
Indias unexpected success (they were quoted at 66 to 1 before the competition began) came under a young and relatively new captain (Kapil Dev) and owed much to the presence in their side of three all-rounders (Kapil Dev, Roger Binny and Mohinder Amarnath) who, at critical moments, found enough in the conditions to help form an effective attack. Who would ever have thought before a ball was bowled that the leading wicket-takers in the competition would be the Sri Lankan De Mel and Binny, with his gentle medium-pace?
Each side received 60 overs. No bowler was allowed more than twelve overs per innings and, to prevent negative bowling, the umpires applied a stricter interpretation than in first-class cricket in regard to wides and bumpers.
The total amount of the Prudential Assurance Companys sponsorship was 500,000, and the gate receipts came to 1,195,712. The aggregate attendance was 232,081, compared with 160,000 in 1975 and 132,000 in 1979. The surplus, distributed to full and associate members of the International Cricket Conference, was in excess of 1,000,000, this being over and above the prior payments of 53,900 to each of the seven full members and one of 30,200 to Zimbabwe.
In addition to the Trophy and silver-gilt medals for each player, India received 20,000 for their victory. As runners-up West Indies won 8,000. The losing semi-finalists, England and Pakistan, each won 4,000. There were also awards of 1,000 to the group winners, plus Man of the Match awards (200 for the group matches, 400 for the semi-finals and 600 for the final).
At their meeting which followed the World Cup, the ICC asked for tenders, to be submitted by the end of 1983, from countries wishing to stage the competition when next it is held.
 |
| ICC WORLD CUP 1987 |
India stun the world
World Cup No. 4
Teams 8
Minnows Zimbabwe
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.
Innovations The first World Cup to be held away from England was also the first to feature neutral umpires.
Early running India beat Australia to the top of Group A on superior run-rate, despite losing to them by one run in the closest match of the tournament. Zimbabwe didn't disgrace themselves, but still lost every match and gave New Zealand (without the unavailable Hadlee) their only victory. In Group B Pakistan cruised through, but England (without the uninterested Gower and Botham) only qualified after a bit of a scramble. West Indies failed to reach the semi-finals for the first time, despite their 191-run annihilation of Sri Lanka.
The semis The hometown script started to go wrong. On a dodgy Bombay pitch, Gooch spent most of his time down on one knee as he and Gatting swept up 117 in 19 overs. The resulting 254 was too much even for India's talented batting line-up. Meanwhile Border's boys, fired up by Zaheer Abbas calling them a bunch of club cricketers, outplayed glamorous Pakistan at Lahore. Despite a searching spell from Imran (3 for 36), Australia eventually reached 267 as Steve Waugh hit 18 from the final over. In reply Pakistan were in the mire at 38 for 3. Imran and Miandad hinted at revival but, after their departure, Pakistan just didn't have the firepower. Australia did, amd McDermott finished with 5 for 54, the best figures of the tournament.
The final We didn't know it at the time, but this was the start of Australia's march to world domination. They won the toss and, as most teams had done throughout the tournament, chose to bat first. In the days before pinch-hitters, Marsh and Boon's 52 in the first ten overs constituted a flyer, and the runs kept flowing as Boon top-scored with 75. But with Gatting in command, their 253 seemed very gettable, until the captain felt the need to reverse-sweep Border's first ball; it took the top edge, bounced off his shoulder, and was snapped up by Greg Dyer behind the stumps. England were struggling from then, and though Lamb shepherded the tail well and DeFreitas biffed the ball around, 17 from Craig McDermott's final over was practically impossible.
Last hurrah Gavaskar, having hit his first and only ODI ton against NZ, and averaged 50 in the tournament, made his last international appearance. Fittingly, it was at Bombay, his home ground. Imran announced the first of his many retirements - but went on to win in 1992. Viv Richards, playing in his fourth World Cup, bid an apt adieu with a tournament-record 181 against Sri Lanka.
First hurrah Sidhu and Moody made their ODI debuts in the same match: Sidhu finished the tournament averaging 55, Moody just 5. Phil Simmons made a couple of fifties and a sparkling 89 against Sri Lanka. Tim May and Andrew Jones rather dribbled onto the international scene.
Not to be forgotten Courtney Walsh, normally the most reliable of death bowlers, had a terrible time. Allan Lamb and Co. took 30 off his last two overs as England scraped a two-wicket win, then Pakistan's last-wicket pair needed 14 from one over to sneak home. Qadir hit a straight six, before Walsh sportingly opted to warn Salim Jaffer for backing up too far, rather than just run him out. When West Indies lost, he received a carpet from a grateful Karachi firm, and a carpeting from the media.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
The fourth World Cup was more widely watched, more closely fought, and more colourful than any of its three predecessors held in England. Any doubts about it were dispelled by the opening matches when Pakistan, the favourites, were run close by Sri Lanka; when India, the holders, were beaten by Australia by 1 run; when England succeeded in scoring 35 off their last three overs to beat West Indies; and when the gallant amateurs of Zimbabwe lost by only 3 runs to New Zealand.
If the rest of the Reliance Cup, as it was officially known and seldom called, could not quite live up to such a start, the experiment of an oriental World Cup was still acknowledged to have been a great success. The semi-finals in Lahore and Bombay held the sub-continent by the ears and eyes, even if they did not produce the results desired by the tens of millions who were following the matches on radio and television. The arrangements for the final, at Eden Gardens in Calcutta, were praised to the full by the winning Australian captain, and rightly.
Any drawbacks resulted from the geographical enormity of the two host countries and the determination of the Indo-Pakistan Joint Management Committee to spread the games around as many as 21 venues. It was the equivalent of staging a tournament in Europe, barring only the Soviet Union, without quite the same facility of transport and telecommunications. Fewer centres would have meant less travelling, a shorter and more compact competition it took six weeks against less than a month for the 1983 World Cup and increased enjoyment all round. For successive matches, the Sri Lankans were shunted from Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, to Kanpur in central India, back to Faisalabad, then across the border again to Pune: two-day journeys every time, with hours spent in transit lounges at airports waiting for flights.
Nevertheless, in circumstances which were perhaps more arduous than they need have been, the organisers did excellently. In return, the weather was kind to them. To all intents, only one match was affected by rain, when Australia and New Zealand were reduced to 30 overs each in Indore. (Happily, the rule that a match could not be carried over to its second day was never exposed in its absurdity.) Otherwise the matches were of 50 overs per side, and on good pitches totals similar to those in previous 60-over World Cups were raised. Viv Richards, and West Indies as a team, set up new records against Sri Lanka for World Cup innings.
If the umpiring was not of the very highest standard, its neutrality served to minimise grievances. Poor neutral umpiring, however, can never be a substitute for good umpiring, whether by home or neutral officials. The standard of scoring, it has to be recorded, was inadequate in many centres, done as it was by local scorers unfamiliar with visiting players, while the telegraph boards were not always kept up to date.
One especial virtue in staging the World Cup in India and Pakistan was that spin had a full part to play, whereas previous competitions in England had been dominated by repetitive seamers. Not one over of spin was risked in the 1975 final. Australia were untypical in that they usually allotted only ten overs to spin; the majority of teams fielded two spinners and benefited on the slow batting pitches that prevailed. In the qualifying rounds, seven of the nine most economical bowlers were spinners. That said, the leading wicket-takers were both fast bowlers, Craig McDermott equalling the World Cup record of eighteen and Imran Khan capturing seventeen in one match less.
Batsmen were not troubled by dew when batting first, as some had feared, but by the strain of batting second. Out of 27 matches, nineteen were won by the side batting first. The received wisdom had been to bowl first in one-day internationals and to determine the target. Now every side wanted to bat first, then watch the opposition fatigued by three and a half hours fielding in the heat make mistakes and panic as the run-rate climbed to 7 and 8 an over. The side batting first played the ball according to its merits; the side batting second seemed to play it according to the run-rate required.
In this context, Australia were fortunate to bat first in five of their six qualifying games, and to be able to do so again in their semi-final and final, on pitches which lost what bounce they had. This luck aside, they were still the team most deserving of victory: they appeared to put the most into the tournament the sweat was dripping from the peaks of the batsmens caps when they warmed up in Madras and they gained their first success of note since 1984. England, the runners-up, arrived with a specialist in tropical diseases and a microwave oven but with only three batsmen capable of scoring at a run a ball. They won whenever their bowlers were able to make up for the deficiencies in their batting.
Co-hosts India and Pakistan, as holders and favourites, had been expected to meet in the final but never met at all, not even in a hastily conceived third-place play-off match which fell through owing to the exorbitant demands of some players. Indeed, it was perhaps as well that their paths never crossed, for there were reports of communal conflict in India after the semi-final results. Pakistan blew hot too soon, winning their first five qualifying games, largely on the basis of some overwhelming bowling from Imran Khan and Abdul Qadir, only for their luck to turn in the semi-final.
In a sense, India handicapped themselves by playing in the weaker qualifying group, much as England had in 1979. In both cases the hosts qualified without having the weak links in their bowling exposed. Indias batting was collectively the most brilliant in the tournament but not always the most effective. The demands of their crowds for spectacular hitting, and enticing awards from a sponsor for every four and six they hit, cannot have been beneficial influences; likewise a never settled dispute which the senior Indian players had with their Board over insignia.
West Indies, in transition, missed their fast bowlers of experience. It is not inconceivable that Malcolm Marshall could have won the World Cup for them had he played. New Zealand, too, were in transition in the absence of Richard Hadlee. Sri Lanka, in the field, were utterly defensive, and confronted by mountainous totals their talented batsmen were crushed.
Like the Sri Lankans, the Zimbabweans returned home without a victory, but they gained many friends by their fielding giving themselves as professionals never quite could and many sympathisers by their nave mistakes and run-outs. For sheer heroism, the innings of the World Cup was David Houghtons 142 against New Zealand.
The Australians had the same keen, uncynical spirit as the Zimbabweans. They worked and worked as a team; and every follower of the game had to be pleased in some measure when, at the end of the Australians victory lap around Eden Gardens, Allan Border was raised on the shoulders of his team-mates and the gold Reliance Cup placed in his hands.
Teams 8
Minnows Zimbabwe
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.
Innovations The first World Cup to be held away from England was also the first to feature neutral umpires.
Early running India beat Australia to the top of Group A on superior run-rate, despite losing to them by one run in the closest match of the tournament. Zimbabwe didn't disgrace themselves, but still lost every match and gave New Zealand (without the unavailable Hadlee) their only victory. In Group B Pakistan cruised through, but England (without the uninterested Gower and Botham) only qualified after a bit of a scramble. West Indies failed to reach the semi-finals for the first time, despite their 191-run annihilation of Sri Lanka.
The semis The hometown script started to go wrong. On a dodgy Bombay pitch, Gooch spent most of his time down on one knee as he and Gatting swept up 117 in 19 overs. The resulting 254 was too much even for India's talented batting line-up. Meanwhile Border's boys, fired up by Zaheer Abbas calling them a bunch of club cricketers, outplayed glamorous Pakistan at Lahore. Despite a searching spell from Imran (3 for 36), Australia eventually reached 267 as Steve Waugh hit 18 from the final over. In reply Pakistan were in the mire at 38 for 3. Imran and Miandad hinted at revival but, after their departure, Pakistan just didn't have the firepower. Australia did, amd McDermott finished with 5 for 54, the best figures of the tournament.
The final We didn't know it at the time, but this was the start of Australia's march to world domination. They won the toss and, as most teams had done throughout the tournament, chose to bat first. In the days before pinch-hitters, Marsh and Boon's 52 in the first ten overs constituted a flyer, and the runs kept flowing as Boon top-scored with 75. But with Gatting in command, their 253 seemed very gettable, until the captain felt the need to reverse-sweep Border's first ball; it took the top edge, bounced off his shoulder, and was snapped up by Greg Dyer behind the stumps. England were struggling from then, and though Lamb shepherded the tail well and DeFreitas biffed the ball around, 17 from Craig McDermott's final over was practically impossible.
Last hurrah Gavaskar, having hit his first and only ODI ton against NZ, and averaged 50 in the tournament, made his last international appearance. Fittingly, it was at Bombay, his home ground. Imran announced the first of his many retirements - but went on to win in 1992. Viv Richards, playing in his fourth World Cup, bid an apt adieu with a tournament-record 181 against Sri Lanka.
First hurrah Sidhu and Moody made their ODI debuts in the same match: Sidhu finished the tournament averaging 55, Moody just 5. Phil Simmons made a couple of fifties and a sparkling 89 against Sri Lanka. Tim May and Andrew Jones rather dribbled onto the international scene.
Not to be forgotten Courtney Walsh, normally the most reliable of death bowlers, had a terrible time. Allan Lamb and Co. took 30 off his last two overs as England scraped a two-wicket win, then Pakistan's last-wicket pair needed 14 from one over to sneak home. Qadir hit a straight six, before Walsh sportingly opted to warn Salim Jaffer for backing up too far, rather than just run him out. When West Indies lost, he received a carpet from a grateful Karachi firm, and a carpeting from the media.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
The fourth World Cup was more widely watched, more closely fought, and more colourful than any of its three predecessors held in England. Any doubts about it were dispelled by the opening matches when Pakistan, the favourites, were run close by Sri Lanka; when India, the holders, were beaten by Australia by 1 run; when England succeeded in scoring 35 off their last three overs to beat West Indies; and when the gallant amateurs of Zimbabwe lost by only 3 runs to New Zealand.
If the rest of the Reliance Cup, as it was officially known and seldom called, could not quite live up to such a start, the experiment of an oriental World Cup was still acknowledged to have been a great success. The semi-finals in Lahore and Bombay held the sub-continent by the ears and eyes, even if they did not produce the results desired by the tens of millions who were following the matches on radio and television. The arrangements for the final, at Eden Gardens in Calcutta, were praised to the full by the winning Australian captain, and rightly.
Any drawbacks resulted from the geographical enormity of the two host countries and the determination of the Indo-Pakistan Joint Management Committee to spread the games around as many as 21 venues. It was the equivalent of staging a tournament in Europe, barring only the Soviet Union, without quite the same facility of transport and telecommunications. Fewer centres would have meant less travelling, a shorter and more compact competition it took six weeks against less than a month for the 1983 World Cup and increased enjoyment all round. For successive matches, the Sri Lankans were shunted from Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, to Kanpur in central India, back to Faisalabad, then across the border again to Pune: two-day journeys every time, with hours spent in transit lounges at airports waiting for flights.
Nevertheless, in circumstances which were perhaps more arduous than they need have been, the organisers did excellently. In return, the weather was kind to them. To all intents, only one match was affected by rain, when Australia and New Zealand were reduced to 30 overs each in Indore. (Happily, the rule that a match could not be carried over to its second day was never exposed in its absurdity.) Otherwise the matches were of 50 overs per side, and on good pitches totals similar to those in previous 60-over World Cups were raised. Viv Richards, and West Indies as a team, set up new records against Sri Lanka for World Cup innings.
If the umpiring was not of the very highest standard, its neutrality served to minimise grievances. Poor neutral umpiring, however, can never be a substitute for good umpiring, whether by home or neutral officials. The standard of scoring, it has to be recorded, was inadequate in many centres, done as it was by local scorers unfamiliar with visiting players, while the telegraph boards were not always kept up to date.
One especial virtue in staging the World Cup in India and Pakistan was that spin had a full part to play, whereas previous competitions in England had been dominated by repetitive seamers. Not one over of spin was risked in the 1975 final. Australia were untypical in that they usually allotted only ten overs to spin; the majority of teams fielded two spinners and benefited on the slow batting pitches that prevailed. In the qualifying rounds, seven of the nine most economical bowlers were spinners. That said, the leading wicket-takers were both fast bowlers, Craig McDermott equalling the World Cup record of eighteen and Imran Khan capturing seventeen in one match less.
Batsmen were not troubled by dew when batting first, as some had feared, but by the strain of batting second. Out of 27 matches, nineteen were won by the side batting first. The received wisdom had been to bowl first in one-day internationals and to determine the target. Now every side wanted to bat first, then watch the opposition fatigued by three and a half hours fielding in the heat make mistakes and panic as the run-rate climbed to 7 and 8 an over. The side batting first played the ball according to its merits; the side batting second seemed to play it according to the run-rate required.
In this context, Australia were fortunate to bat first in five of their six qualifying games, and to be able to do so again in their semi-final and final, on pitches which lost what bounce they had. This luck aside, they were still the team most deserving of victory: they appeared to put the most into the tournament the sweat was dripping from the peaks of the batsmens caps when they warmed up in Madras and they gained their first success of note since 1984. England, the runners-up, arrived with a specialist in tropical diseases and a microwave oven but with only three batsmen capable of scoring at a run a ball. They won whenever their bowlers were able to make up for the deficiencies in their batting.
Co-hosts India and Pakistan, as holders and favourites, had been expected to meet in the final but never met at all, not even in a hastily conceived third-place play-off match which fell through owing to the exorbitant demands of some players. Indeed, it was perhaps as well that their paths never crossed, for there were reports of communal conflict in India after the semi-final results. Pakistan blew hot too soon, winning their first five qualifying games, largely on the basis of some overwhelming bowling from Imran Khan and Abdul Qadir, only for their luck to turn in the semi-final.
In a sense, India handicapped themselves by playing in the weaker qualifying group, much as England had in 1979. In both cases the hosts qualified without having the weak links in their bowling exposed. Indias batting was collectively the most brilliant in the tournament but not always the most effective. The demands of their crowds for spectacular hitting, and enticing awards from a sponsor for every four and six they hit, cannot have been beneficial influences; likewise a never settled dispute which the senior Indian players had with their Board over insignia.
West Indies, in transition, missed their fast bowlers of experience. It is not inconceivable that Malcolm Marshall could have won the World Cup for them had he played. New Zealand, too, were in transition in the absence of Richard Hadlee. Sri Lanka, in the field, were utterly defensive, and confronted by mountainous totals their talented batsmen were crushed.
Like the Sri Lankans, the Zimbabweans returned home without a victory, but they gained many friends by their fielding giving themselves as professionals never quite could and many sympathisers by their nave mistakes and run-outs. For sheer heroism, the innings of the World Cup was David Houghtons 142 against New Zealand.
The Australians had the same keen, uncynical spirit as the Zimbabweans. They worked and worked as a team; and every follower of the game had to be pleased in some measure when, at the end of the Australians victory lap around Eden Gardens, Allan Border was raised on the shoulders of his team-mates and the gold Reliance Cup placed in his hands.
 |
| ICC World Cup 1992 |
"Pakistan" Imran's Tigers turn the corner
World Cup No. 5
Teams 9
Minnows Only Zimbabwe
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.
Innovations Four big ones ... 1) Coloured clothing, with names on the back. 2) Floodlights for most of the 36 games. 3) The white ball: in fact two of them, one at each end (so they didn't get too grubby), which meant they swung prodigiously. 4) The fielding circle rules were refined, allowing only two men outside the ring in the first 15 overs. After that, it was as before: a minimum of four inside the circle. Result: the birth of the pinch-hitter. Ian Botham did the job for England, with mixed results.
Early running Australia, the holders and hosts, were such hot favourites that the pressure got to them. They lost the opening game, in New Zealand (Martin Crowe 100*), and then faced England at Sydney. Botham sniffed the chance to trample the Aussies into the dirt for one last time, took 4 for 31 and then made 53 not out as England won by eight wickets. Pakistan started dreadfully, losing to West Indies by 10 wickets, and would have gone out if rain had not saved them at Adelaide after England bowled them out for 74. England and New Zealand were the best teams for a long time, but both had peaked too soon. Imran Khan famously told his team: "Listen, just be as if you were a cornered tiger," and they moved into top gear.
The semis What's the Afrikaans for "We wuz robbed"? South Africa, playing England, needed 22 off 13 balls when it rained. By the time it stopped, they needed 21 off one ball. However, Kepler Wessels had chosen to bat second, and South Africa had bowled terribly slowly. NZ's brave run came to an end as Pakistan successfully chased 262, with the unknown Inzamam-ul-Haq thumping 60 off 37 balls.
The final Pakistan were on fire, and England were not. Derek Pringle (3 for 22) removed the openers, but Imran Khan and Javed Miandad (44 and 57* in the semi) made 72 and 58 as Pakistan recovered to 249 for 6. England were soon 69 for 4 (Botham 0), and when Neil Fairbrother (62) and Allan Lamb (31) launched a recovery, Wasim Akram snuffed it out, bowling Lamb and Chris Lewis with consecutive beauties. Pakistan won by 22 runs.
Last hurrah A whole herd of giants headed into the sunset. Imran never played again, Botham managed one last injury-ravaged summer, and it was also the last World Cup for Gooch, Border, Lamb, Des Haynes ...
First hurrah Haynes's opening partner was a young thruster named Lara. Mushtaq Ahmed shone for Pakistan, and Jonty Rhodes became the first superstar fielder.
Not to be forgotten Crowe opened NZ's bowling with Dipak Patel's offspin. When England met India at Perth, Botham faced Sachin Tendulkar for the only time in an international: a fascinating little duel ended with Tendulkar caught behind for 35.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
After the manner of the Olympic Games, crickets World Cup quadrennially grows larger and more spectacular. The event, staged in Australia (25 matches) and New Zealand (14 matches) in 1992, featured, for the first time, all eight Test-playing teams, with aspiring Zimbabwe taking the number of competing sides to an unprecedented nine. The final was the 39th match. The first two tournaments, in 1975 and 1979 in England, featured only 15 matches, while in 1983 ( England) and 1987 ( India and Pakistan) there were 27.
The fifth World Cup was the first to be played in coloured clothing, with a white ball and some games under floodlights. Although it was again 50 overs a side rather than the original 60, it was generally considered to have been the fairest: each side played all the others once before the top four in the qualifying table played off in the semi-finals. Lasting 33 days from first ball to last, it could be faulted seriously only in the matter of the rules governing rain-interrupted matches.
Recognising the imperfection of a straight run-rate calculation when a second innings has to be shortened after rain, and unable to schedule spare days within the time-frame of the tournament, the World Cup committee adopted a scheme whereby the reduction in the target would be commensurate with the lowest-scoring overs of the side which batted first. Against South Africa in Melbourne, England lost nine overs but their target of 237 was reduced by only 11 runs. When the teams next met, in the Sydney semi-final, another rain pause, this time at the climactic moment, led to an uproar which echoed for weeks afterwards.
Pakistan won the World Cup for the first time, beating England (twice previous finalists, never winners) by 22 runs on a memorably dramatic autumn night in Melbourne, before an Australian limited-overs record crowd of 87,182 who paid $A2 million (880,000). Almost half of them sat in the newly completed Great Southern Stand, which cost $A140 million and is the largest construction ever conceived for Australian sport. It was further claimed that the global television audience exceeded one billion, in 29 countries. In Pakistan, where it was still early evening, jubilation verging on the hysterical splashed over into the streets, and upon their return the players were placed on the highest pedestals of heroism.
Imran Khan, the captain, in his 40th year and nursing a troublesome right shoulder, unsurprisingly declared this as his finest hour, a claim clearly supported by the pictures of him holding the 7,500 Waterford crystal trophy, eyes wide with exhilaration, after ICC chairman Sir Colin Cowdrey had presented it to him on the MCG dais. This accomplished all-rounder, top-scorer in the final with a measured 72, had urged his young team on through times when it seemed that qualification for the semi-finals was out of the question. They were, he said, to take on the stance and response of the cornered tiger. He dedicated the victory to the cause of a cancer hospital in Lahore for which he was fund-raising in memory of his mother. The World Cup organisers seemed content to overlook Imrans earlier remark that it was the worst-organised of all the World Cups. He and Javed Miandad (who became the highest overall run-scorer) alone have played in all five tournaments.
Excitement was high from the opening day, when New Zealand caused the first upset by beating Australia, the holders and favourites, by a comfortable margin at Auckland. Led by Martin Crowe, who made a century, New Zealand were initiating a remarkable run of victories on their slow pitches, Patel bowling off-spin at the start of the innings, followed by a bevy of harmless-looking medium-pacers challenging batsmen to come at them. Crowes brilliant batsmanship and imaginative command in the field, augmented by the shameless six-hitting of opener Greatbatch, who earned a place only when Wright was injured, took New Zealand almost to the ultimate glory. The co-hosts won their first seven matches, and were not harmed by defeat (by Pakistan) in the eighth, for it assured them of a home semi-final. The sub-plots were multiple, for Pakistan, through this victory at Christchurch, managed to reach the semi-finals so long as Australia (who had just lost their last chance) beat West Indies at Melbourne a few hours later. Boons century, his second of the series, and Whitneys four wickets ensured this, putting West Indies out of the competition too.
Australia had started as favourites, but their approach was too inflexible and their form too fickle. New strategies had not so much passed them by as struck no receptive chords in captain Allan Border or coach Bob Simpson. There had been a reluctance to drop the faithful Marsh, who was taking far too much time over his runs, and Simon ODonnell, voted top player the previous season, was not even chosen in the squad. The nation was mortified as the defeats piled up, the only victory in Australias first four matches coming by a solitary run in the most thrilling of all the finishes: at Brisbane, when the last ball seemed successively to be a winning boundary for India, then a catch, then again a spillage into the boundary gutter, with Steve Waughs long recovery throw perhaps too wide, but gathered by substitute wicket-keeper Boon, who made ground to beat the batsman by a few inches. Towards the end of the competition, Australians had been compelled to adopt other allegiances, with no small amount of sympathy being extended South Africas way.
Readmitted to the international brotherhood after 21 years of political isolation, South Africa, led by Bloemfontein-born former Australian Test batsman Kepler Wessels, were an unpredictable commodity. They had won one of their three introductory limited-overs matches in India in some style three months previously. Now, overseen by coach Mike Procter, one of the worlds greatest cricketers at the time of South Africas expulsion, and spearheaded by the speedy Donald, they stepped coolly on to the stage and beat Australia by nine wickets before a clamorous crowd of almost 40,000 at Sydney, proportionate noise issuing from the throats of hundreds of South African supporters, some of them now resident in Australia. Wesselss partner at the end was Peter Kirsten, who was left out of the original tour squad but was to average 68.33 in the preliminary matches.
Setbacks against New Zealand and Sri Lanka were put behind them as South Africa won their historic encounter with West Indies in a cordially conducted match at Christchurch, following this with a rain-assisted victory over Pakistan at Brisbane, where Jonty Rhodes, already having attracted notice by his electrifying fielding, immortalized himself with an airborne demolition of the stumps to run out Inzamam-ul-Haq. Their place in the semi-finals was secured with victory over India in a shortened match at Adelaide, only for their campaign to be ended cruelly by the sudden heavy shower which fell on the SCG just before 10 p.m., transforming a requirement of 22 off 13 balls to a mocking 21 off one. The crowds frustration and hostility focused upon the England players in lieu of the rule-makers, while the South Africans absorbed their acute disappointment with a dignified and somehow joyous lap of honour. Beyond the bounds of cricket, it was believed that their success in the tournament had had an influence on the crucial referendum which decided whether President de Klerks reforms were to be continued. Support for his progressive dismantling of apartheid was shown in a substantial majority of the white populations votes, some of it unquestionably swayed by live pictures from the far side of the Indian Ocean which showed the national team competing popularly and successfully after having been excommunicated for so long.
The odds after two weeks of competition were affected by the vacillating form most particularly of India and West Indies, both past winners. Reshaped after the jettisoning of several senior players, and led by an out-of-touch Richie Richardson, West Indies won their first match convincingly by making 221 without losing a wicket. This was not against the lesser Zimbabwe or Sri Lanka. It was against Pakistan, the eventual champions. Thereafter they seemed out of sorts, though Brian Lara, the flowery left-hander, finished with four half-centuries. India lost a tight opening match against England, beat Pakistan, who fell apart under the Sydney lights, but were themselves soon to fall by the wayside through poor fielding and an indecisiveness in all departments.
Sri Lanka managed two victories, scoring 313 at New Plymouth to deny Zimbabwe what had seemed a certain triumph given the weight of their own innings, centurion Andy Flower having had his effort capitalized by Andy Wallers 32-ball half-century. Sri Lankas other success was against South Africa at Wellington, when Ranatunga steered them home by three wickets with only a ball to spare.
The most unexpected result came on the last day of the qualifying matches, when Zimbabwe, having made only 134 on a sporting pitch at Albury, overthrew England by nine runs, Eddo Brandes taking the bowling honours. England could afford to lose, as was the case in their previous match, against New Zealand, although the long run of success which began when they landed in New Zealand for their Test-match tour as the year opened was now broken and in urgent need of repair, particularly as several key players were carrying injuries. The somewhat fortuitous semi-final victory over South Africa restored their direction even if it could not dispel the accumulated weariness. In retrospect, they might have looked back upon their crushing defeat of Australia as their sweetest moment.
Graham Goochs combination became favourites when Australia began to crack. The depth of batting and breadth of bowling alternatives made possible by so many all-rounders, together with the blend of experience and, in key positions, athleticism in the field, gave England the appearance of certain finalists and probable trophy-winners. Fatigue and Pakistans inspired surge were to deny them on the night.
Not unexpectedly, the World Cup was given wide coverage in Australasia, though Channel 9s television cameras were installed only at venues where the organisers felt the interest would be greatest. Matches which they did cover were comprehensively treated, although this was of little comfort to the legions of cricket enthusiasts in Britain who had no access to the BSkyB satellite television reception which was beamed almost around the clock. Apart from two-minute news segments, only half an hour of highlights of the final was shown on BBC TV. Some of the lower-shelf fixtures were staged in rural areas, Alburys reward being the historic upset when Zimbabwe beat England, contrasting with Mackays fate after all the months of preparation, which was a washout after two balls.
The emergence of new faces was refreshing. Hudson, Snell and Pringle from South Africa, Lara from West Indies, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed and Aamir Sohail from Pakistan all made a mark, five of them still not Test players. And electrifying incidents were captured not only in the television replays but subsequently in the proliferation of commemorative video-cassettes. Rhodess flying run-out at Brisbane was memorable, but wicket-keeper Mores back-flick to run out Crowe at Dunedin may well have been the most extraordinary dismissal of all. Not that Borders throwing accuracy, such as when he ran out Azharuddin at Brisbane, will soon be forgotten, or the stumping of Harris from a Mushtaq Ahmed wide, or the demolition of Bothams middle stump (which contained the miniature TV camera) by McMillan, or some of Healys catches behind the wicket, or Mushtaqs googly to defeat Hick and Wasim Akrams wicked in-swinger to bowl Lewis in the final.
The pool of umpires from the competing nations brought an added flavour of internationalism without quite ensuring the exclusion of errors, some of them quite glaring. Messrs Bucknor and Shepherd were generally regarded as the most reliable. The no-ball penalty for shoulder-high bouncers was not always consistently interpreted, but ensured that the matches were safeguarded from the excesses so often witnessed in the recent past, especially at Test level.
Perversely, as in 1987, neither host nation won through to the final. Seriously stunned in 1987 by their loss to Australia in the semi-final at Lahore, Pakistan somehow lifted themselves in the 1992 tournament after having won only one of their first five matches. Handicapped by the absence through injury of their outstanding fast bowler, Waqar Younis, they were spurred on by their rarefied captain, Imran Khan. As far as bowling strategy went they played aggressively throughout and with the bat too, once the disciplined foundation had been laid. There was satisfaction in seeing the best two teams in the final, and, for the rare objective onlooker, a slight sadness that only one of them could triumph. For a month, the World Cup not only generated large profits but stirred many hearts and touched countless nerve-ends around the cricket world.
Teams 9
Minnows Only Zimbabwe
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.
Innovations Four big ones ... 1) Coloured clothing, with names on the back. 2) Floodlights for most of the 36 games. 3) The white ball: in fact two of them, one at each end (so they didn't get too grubby), which meant they swung prodigiously. 4) The fielding circle rules were refined, allowing only two men outside the ring in the first 15 overs. After that, it was as before: a minimum of four inside the circle. Result: the birth of the pinch-hitter. Ian Botham did the job for England, with mixed results.
Early running Australia, the holders and hosts, were such hot favourites that the pressure got to them. They lost the opening game, in New Zealand (Martin Crowe 100*), and then faced England at Sydney. Botham sniffed the chance to trample the Aussies into the dirt for one last time, took 4 for 31 and then made 53 not out as England won by eight wickets. Pakistan started dreadfully, losing to West Indies by 10 wickets, and would have gone out if rain had not saved them at Adelaide after England bowled them out for 74. England and New Zealand were the best teams for a long time, but both had peaked too soon. Imran Khan famously told his team: "Listen, just be as if you were a cornered tiger," and they moved into top gear.
The semis What's the Afrikaans for "We wuz robbed"? South Africa, playing England, needed 22 off 13 balls when it rained. By the time it stopped, they needed 21 off one ball. However, Kepler Wessels had chosen to bat second, and South Africa had bowled terribly slowly. NZ's brave run came to an end as Pakistan successfully chased 262, with the unknown Inzamam-ul-Haq thumping 60 off 37 balls.
The final Pakistan were on fire, and England were not. Derek Pringle (3 for 22) removed the openers, but Imran Khan and Javed Miandad (44 and 57* in the semi) made 72 and 58 as Pakistan recovered to 249 for 6. England were soon 69 for 4 (Botham 0), and when Neil Fairbrother (62) and Allan Lamb (31) launched a recovery, Wasim Akram snuffed it out, bowling Lamb and Chris Lewis with consecutive beauties. Pakistan won by 22 runs.
Last hurrah A whole herd of giants headed into the sunset. Imran never played again, Botham managed one last injury-ravaged summer, and it was also the last World Cup for Gooch, Border, Lamb, Des Haynes ...
First hurrah Haynes's opening partner was a young thruster named Lara. Mushtaq Ahmed shone for Pakistan, and Jonty Rhodes became the first superstar fielder.
Not to be forgotten Crowe opened NZ's bowling with Dipak Patel's offspin. When England met India at Perth, Botham faced Sachin Tendulkar for the only time in an international: a fascinating little duel ended with Tendulkar caught behind for 35.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
After the manner of the Olympic Games, crickets World Cup quadrennially grows larger and more spectacular. The event, staged in Australia (25 matches) and New Zealand (14 matches) in 1992, featured, for the first time, all eight Test-playing teams, with aspiring Zimbabwe taking the number of competing sides to an unprecedented nine. The final was the 39th match. The first two tournaments, in 1975 and 1979 in England, featured only 15 matches, while in 1983 ( England) and 1987 ( India and Pakistan) there were 27.
The fifth World Cup was the first to be played in coloured clothing, with a white ball and some games under floodlights. Although it was again 50 overs a side rather than the original 60, it was generally considered to have been the fairest: each side played all the others once before the top four in the qualifying table played off in the semi-finals. Lasting 33 days from first ball to last, it could be faulted seriously only in the matter of the rules governing rain-interrupted matches.
Recognising the imperfection of a straight run-rate calculation when a second innings has to be shortened after rain, and unable to schedule spare days within the time-frame of the tournament, the World Cup committee adopted a scheme whereby the reduction in the target would be commensurate with the lowest-scoring overs of the side which batted first. Against South Africa in Melbourne, England lost nine overs but their target of 237 was reduced by only 11 runs. When the teams next met, in the Sydney semi-final, another rain pause, this time at the climactic moment, led to an uproar which echoed for weeks afterwards.
Pakistan won the World Cup for the first time, beating England (twice previous finalists, never winners) by 22 runs on a memorably dramatic autumn night in Melbourne, before an Australian limited-overs record crowd of 87,182 who paid $A2 million (880,000). Almost half of them sat in the newly completed Great Southern Stand, which cost $A140 million and is the largest construction ever conceived for Australian sport. It was further claimed that the global television audience exceeded one billion, in 29 countries. In Pakistan, where it was still early evening, jubilation verging on the hysterical splashed over into the streets, and upon their return the players were placed on the highest pedestals of heroism.
Imran Khan, the captain, in his 40th year and nursing a troublesome right shoulder, unsurprisingly declared this as his finest hour, a claim clearly supported by the pictures of him holding the 7,500 Waterford crystal trophy, eyes wide with exhilaration, after ICC chairman Sir Colin Cowdrey had presented it to him on the MCG dais. This accomplished all-rounder, top-scorer in the final with a measured 72, had urged his young team on through times when it seemed that qualification for the semi-finals was out of the question. They were, he said, to take on the stance and response of the cornered tiger. He dedicated the victory to the cause of a cancer hospital in Lahore for which he was fund-raising in memory of his mother. The World Cup organisers seemed content to overlook Imrans earlier remark that it was the worst-organised of all the World Cups. He and Javed Miandad (who became the highest overall run-scorer) alone have played in all five tournaments.
Excitement was high from the opening day, when New Zealand caused the first upset by beating Australia, the holders and favourites, by a comfortable margin at Auckland. Led by Martin Crowe, who made a century, New Zealand were initiating a remarkable run of victories on their slow pitches, Patel bowling off-spin at the start of the innings, followed by a bevy of harmless-looking medium-pacers challenging batsmen to come at them. Crowes brilliant batsmanship and imaginative command in the field, augmented by the shameless six-hitting of opener Greatbatch, who earned a place only when Wright was injured, took New Zealand almost to the ultimate glory. The co-hosts won their first seven matches, and were not harmed by defeat (by Pakistan) in the eighth, for it assured them of a home semi-final. The sub-plots were multiple, for Pakistan, through this victory at Christchurch, managed to reach the semi-finals so long as Australia (who had just lost their last chance) beat West Indies at Melbourne a few hours later. Boons century, his second of the series, and Whitneys four wickets ensured this, putting West Indies out of the competition too.
Australia had started as favourites, but their approach was too inflexible and their form too fickle. New strategies had not so much passed them by as struck no receptive chords in captain Allan Border or coach Bob Simpson. There had been a reluctance to drop the faithful Marsh, who was taking far too much time over his runs, and Simon ODonnell, voted top player the previous season, was not even chosen in the squad. The nation was mortified as the defeats piled up, the only victory in Australias first four matches coming by a solitary run in the most thrilling of all the finishes: at Brisbane, when the last ball seemed successively to be a winning boundary for India, then a catch, then again a spillage into the boundary gutter, with Steve Waughs long recovery throw perhaps too wide, but gathered by substitute wicket-keeper Boon, who made ground to beat the batsman by a few inches. Towards the end of the competition, Australians had been compelled to adopt other allegiances, with no small amount of sympathy being extended South Africas way.
Readmitted to the international brotherhood after 21 years of political isolation, South Africa, led by Bloemfontein-born former Australian Test batsman Kepler Wessels, were an unpredictable commodity. They had won one of their three introductory limited-overs matches in India in some style three months previously. Now, overseen by coach Mike Procter, one of the worlds greatest cricketers at the time of South Africas expulsion, and spearheaded by the speedy Donald, they stepped coolly on to the stage and beat Australia by nine wickets before a clamorous crowd of almost 40,000 at Sydney, proportionate noise issuing from the throats of hundreds of South African supporters, some of them now resident in Australia. Wesselss partner at the end was Peter Kirsten, who was left out of the original tour squad but was to average 68.33 in the preliminary matches.
Setbacks against New Zealand and Sri Lanka were put behind them as South Africa won their historic encounter with West Indies in a cordially conducted match at Christchurch, following this with a rain-assisted victory over Pakistan at Brisbane, where Jonty Rhodes, already having attracted notice by his electrifying fielding, immortalized himself with an airborne demolition of the stumps to run out Inzamam-ul-Haq. Their place in the semi-finals was secured with victory over India in a shortened match at Adelaide, only for their campaign to be ended cruelly by the sudden heavy shower which fell on the SCG just before 10 p.m., transforming a requirement of 22 off 13 balls to a mocking 21 off one. The crowds frustration and hostility focused upon the England players in lieu of the rule-makers, while the South Africans absorbed their acute disappointment with a dignified and somehow joyous lap of honour. Beyond the bounds of cricket, it was believed that their success in the tournament had had an influence on the crucial referendum which decided whether President de Klerks reforms were to be continued. Support for his progressive dismantling of apartheid was shown in a substantial majority of the white populations votes, some of it unquestionably swayed by live pictures from the far side of the Indian Ocean which showed the national team competing popularly and successfully after having been excommunicated for so long.
The odds after two weeks of competition were affected by the vacillating form most particularly of India and West Indies, both past winners. Reshaped after the jettisoning of several senior players, and led by an out-of-touch Richie Richardson, West Indies won their first match convincingly by making 221 without losing a wicket. This was not against the lesser Zimbabwe or Sri Lanka. It was against Pakistan, the eventual champions. Thereafter they seemed out of sorts, though Brian Lara, the flowery left-hander, finished with four half-centuries. India lost a tight opening match against England, beat Pakistan, who fell apart under the Sydney lights, but were themselves soon to fall by the wayside through poor fielding and an indecisiveness in all departments.
Sri Lanka managed two victories, scoring 313 at New Plymouth to deny Zimbabwe what had seemed a certain triumph given the weight of their own innings, centurion Andy Flower having had his effort capitalized by Andy Wallers 32-ball half-century. Sri Lankas other success was against South Africa at Wellington, when Ranatunga steered them home by three wickets with only a ball to spare.
The most unexpected result came on the last day of the qualifying matches, when Zimbabwe, having made only 134 on a sporting pitch at Albury, overthrew England by nine runs, Eddo Brandes taking the bowling honours. England could afford to lose, as was the case in their previous match, against New Zealand, although the long run of success which began when they landed in New Zealand for their Test-match tour as the year opened was now broken and in urgent need of repair, particularly as several key players were carrying injuries. The somewhat fortuitous semi-final victory over South Africa restored their direction even if it could not dispel the accumulated weariness. In retrospect, they might have looked back upon their crushing defeat of Australia as their sweetest moment.
Graham Goochs combination became favourites when Australia began to crack. The depth of batting and breadth of bowling alternatives made possible by so many all-rounders, together with the blend of experience and, in key positions, athleticism in the field, gave England the appearance of certain finalists and probable trophy-winners. Fatigue and Pakistans inspired surge were to deny them on the night.
Not unexpectedly, the World Cup was given wide coverage in Australasia, though Channel 9s television cameras were installed only at venues where the organisers felt the interest would be greatest. Matches which they did cover were comprehensively treated, although this was of little comfort to the legions of cricket enthusiasts in Britain who had no access to the BSkyB satellite television reception which was beamed almost around the clock. Apart from two-minute news segments, only half an hour of highlights of the final was shown on BBC TV. Some of the lower-shelf fixtures were staged in rural areas, Alburys reward being the historic upset when Zimbabwe beat England, contrasting with Mackays fate after all the months of preparation, which was a washout after two balls.
The emergence of new faces was refreshing. Hudson, Snell and Pringle from South Africa, Lara from West Indies, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mushtaq Ahmed and Aamir Sohail from Pakistan all made a mark, five of them still not Test players. And electrifying incidents were captured not only in the television replays but subsequently in the proliferation of commemorative video-cassettes. Rhodess flying run-out at Brisbane was memorable, but wicket-keeper Mores back-flick to run out Crowe at Dunedin may well have been the most extraordinary dismissal of all. Not that Borders throwing accuracy, such as when he ran out Azharuddin at Brisbane, will soon be forgotten, or the stumping of Harris from a Mushtaq Ahmed wide, or the demolition of Bothams middle stump (which contained the miniature TV camera) by McMillan, or some of Healys catches behind the wicket, or Mushtaqs googly to defeat Hick and Wasim Akrams wicked in-swinger to bowl Lewis in the final.
The pool of umpires from the competing nations brought an added flavour of internationalism without quite ensuring the exclusion of errors, some of them quite glaring. Messrs Bucknor and Shepherd were generally regarded as the most reliable. The no-ball penalty for shoulder-high bouncers was not always consistently interpreted, but ensured that the matches were safeguarded from the excesses so often witnessed in the recent past, especially at Test level.
Perversely, as in 1987, neither host nation won through to the final. Seriously stunned in 1987 by their loss to Australia in the semi-final at Lahore, Pakistan somehow lifted themselves in the 1992 tournament after having won only one of their first five matches. Handicapped by the absence through injury of their outstanding fast bowler, Waqar Younis, they were spurred on by their rarefied captain, Imran Khan. As far as bowling strategy went they played aggressively throughout and with the bat too, once the disciplined foundation had been laid. There was satisfaction in seeing the best two teams in the final, and, for the rare objective onlooker, a slight sadness that only one of them could triumph. For a month, the World Cup not only generated large profits but stirred many hearts and touched countless nerve-ends around the cricket world.
 |
| ICC WORLD CUP 1996 |
Sri Lanka's crowning glory
World Cup No. 6
Teams 12
Minnows Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates
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.
Innovations 15-over fielding restrictions had made their debut in 1992, but 1996 was the year the pinch-hitters really seized their opportunity. Sri Lanka, Australia and India exploited the wide open spaces with aggressive early batting. England didn't. The third umpire also made his first appearance in front of the TV monitor.
Early running Sri Lanka finished top of Group A despite beating only India of the fancied teams; Australia and West Indies forfeited their matches in Colombo rather than travel to a city where over 1000 people had been injured in a terrorist bomb only three weeks earlier. But South Africa were the clear favourites after five hyper-efficient victories in Group B. Gary Kirsten's 188 not out against UAE was a Cup record. England, meanwhile, lost all three of their games against Test nations, wobbled against Holland, and lost their lunch against UAE (at least, Neil Smith did).
The quarters Jayasuriya savaged England, who went down to their tenth successive defeat by a Test nation, but skipper Atherton got off lighter than Wasim Akram, who dropped out of Pakistan's tie with India, citing a side-strain. His Lahore house was stoned after they lost by 39 runs. A spectacular 130 from NZ's unheralded Chris Harris left Australia in need of their highest total batting second to win an ODI: Mark Waugh's record third hundred of the tournament (he had already become the first man to make successive Cup tons) made sure they got it. But the surprise packages were West Indies, as Lara's 111 inspired them to a 19-run win over South Africa.
The semis A Calcutta crowd of 110,000 boiled over as India slid to 120 for 8 in pursuit of Sri Lanka's 252. Fires were started in the stands, leading to a win "by default" for SL. India's decline had come as a surprise after Srinath removed ballistic openers Jayasuriya and Kaluwitharana in the first over, but de Silva's 66 led a recovery. That was nothing, however, when compared with Australia's comeback: they were 15 for 4 before Law and Bevan dragged them up to 207 for 8, then West Indies cruised to 165 for 2 in the 42nd over. But four wickets from Warne and some tactical wizardry from Mark Taylor precipitated an incredible collapse: West Indies lost 8 for 37 in 50 balls, and Richardson was stranded on 49 not out.
The final No-one had dominated a World Cup final to the extent that de Silva did here. He took two catches and three wickets, including Australia's top-scorers Taylor and Ponting, then strolled to an elegant 107 not out. Handicapped by a slippery, dew-covered ball, Australia dropped several chances, but never looked like defending 241.
Last hurrah Javed Miandad, the only man to play in every World Cup to date, finally bowed out. He batted three times, making 11*, 5, and 38 in the quarter-final. And Robin Smith's selectorial misfortune continued: he helped provide England's brightest moment, a record 147-run opening stand against Pakistan, and was dumped for good immediately after the tournament. It was also World Cup curtains for Richie Richardson, Roger Harper, Asanka Gurusinha, Ramiz Raja, Manoj Prabhakar, Phil DeFreitas, Dipak Patel, Andy Waller and Craig McDermott (three Cups each). McDermott bowled only three overs before returning home with a calf strain.
First hurrah Waqar Younis, surprisingly, was appearing in his first World Cup (back injury in 1992). Atherton and Gough made their debuts in the deflating defeat by New Zealand, for whom only four players had prior Cup experience. Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Ricky Ponting and Glenn McGrath added to growing reputations while Romesh Kaluwitharana is remembered as half of an all-conquering opening partnership, even though he made only 73 runs at 12.17.
Not to be forgotten Kenya beat West Indies in a qualifying match at Pune on Leap Year Day: Steve Tikolo, Kenya's only professional, top-scored with 29 out of 166, then Maurice Odumbe and Rajab Ali took three wickets apiece as West Indies crumbled for 93. The prize wicket of Brian Lara fell to a catch by portly, bespectacled keeper Tariq Iqbal; some thought it was the only ball he had held onto all day.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
There were some good, uplifting aspects to the sixth cricket World Cup, not least the style and smiles of its unsuspected winners, Sri Lanka, but overall this was not a tournament to linger fondly in the memory. Wounded by events beyond its control even before its opening, the competition proceeded to frustrate and bewilder through an interminable and largely irrelevant saga of group games in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka before hastening frantically through its knockout games in little more than a week.
The event was poorly conceived in its format and its logistics and suffered throughout from the threat and ultimately the reality of crowd disorder. The abandonment of the semi-final at Eden Gardens, Calcutta, following bottle-throwing and fire-lighting on the terraces, was a shameful reflection on standards of sportsmanship in an area until recently renowned for its appreciation of all things good in the game of cricket.
Perhaps, however, we should not be too harsh on the individuals responsible for the riot in Calcutta. They were merely responding to the seductions created for them by the promoters of the Wills World Cup, an event that plainly, disastrously, put money-making above all the fundamentals of organising a global sporting competition. As the glamorising of the Indian and Pakistani cricketers reached new and absurd heights, so too did the unshakeable belief of the masses in their invincibility. Defeat, of the kind that came to India that night in Calcutta, was popularly unimaginable, with consequences for which many must share the blame.
It was all markedly at odds with the 1987 World Cup, also co-hosted by India and Pakistan and widely judged to be an organisational triumph. Players and observers alike enjoyed that competition far more than the 1996 event. Yet the paradox is that, when the accounts were complete, they showed a negligible profit. Within a decade, the profile of the game had altered substantially; so too, it transpired, had the methods and ambitions of those charged with running the tournament. Suddenly, it was deemed more important to register a company as supplier of official chewing gum and take its money than to pay proper attention to the welfare of the competing teams. Of course, it is possible to become too nannyish about professional sportsmen, who by and large lead a pretty pampered existence, but the wearisome travel schedules, illogical playing itineraries and inadequate practice facilities inflicted on most of the visiting teams would have caused a serious rebellion had this been a football championship.
In fact, such elementary flaws should have been dealt with at source, long before they became a millstone around the event. The reason they were not the handing over by the International Cricket Council of all responsibility for the tournament to the World Cup committee, Pilcom reflects poorly on all those responsible. What function does ICC perform if it is not to be a vigilant monitor of events like this? Cricket must never permit such complacency again.
ICC must also take the blame for the format. The expansion of the field to 12, from nine in 1992, was quite right. By embracing three of ICCs Associate Members, the non-Test countries, the World Cup was fulfilling its missionary aim (though whether the Associates, wooed by financial guarantees, had too much say in the venue is another serious matter for ICC to consider). The problem arose when the extra teams were accommodated by a complete change from the successful 1992 system, a round-robin producing four semi-finalists. Instead, the teams were divided into two groups of six, from which not four but eight sides would proceed to the knockout rounds. The effect of this, obvious in advance, was to reduce virtually a month of cricket to the status of little more than practice games: duly, almost inevitably, the three Associate nations and the junior Test-playing team, Zimbabwe, were eliminated.
All this could have been avoided, and a genuinely competitive group programme installed, by discarding the idea of quarter-finals and going straight to a last four. Presumably, the attraction of four big crowds, four big television games, was too great, but this was a decision taken on flawed grounds. The people were not all fooled; the group games in Pakistan, particularly, drew very small crowds.
The logistical chaos of the competition stemmed largely from the decision, laudable in theory but utterly unrealistic, to spread the tournament to virtually every corner of the vast country of India. The 17 games scheduled for the country were all staged in different cities and insufficient attention had been paid to the practicalities of moving teams (let alone television crews and media people) between games. Travel in India is problematical at best; a few specific alterations were made to airline schedules to oblige the competition organisers but nowhere near enough to surmount the problem, the size of which became clear during the first, eventful weekend. The teams were all due to gather in Calcutta for a variety of briefing meetings before the much-vaunted opening ceremony, a celebration of technology for which the organisers had outlaid considerable capital.
As it transpired, however, the weekend was dominated by the issue of two teams, Australia and West Indies, adamantly refusing to play their scheduled group games in Colombo. The bomb blast in the city, a fortnight earlier, was the clinching factor, but Australias players were already uncomfortable about visiting Sri Lanka, with whom they had just played an acrimonious Test series. In truth, they were reluctant to participate in the Cup at all, the backwash of their bribery allegations against Salim Malik having brought threats of an unpleasant nature from a number of fanatics around Pakistan. West Indies had far less reason for prudence on the Colombo issue, but the condemnatory tone of the organisers against the two defectors gave the episode an unwarranted tone, intensified by a press conference that touched heights of incoherent rancour. It was even suggested that Australia and West Indies were indulging in a vendetta against the Third World, until it was gently pointed out, by ICCs chairman, Sir Clyde Walcott, that the Caribbean forms part of the Third World.
Positions being entrenched, the matches were forfeited, though it was a commentary on the cosiness of the format that Australia and West Indies could make such a sacrifice without seriously endangering their progress to the business end of the tournament. Sri Lanka were both winners and losers winners because they received four points, and a comfortable passage to the last eight, without playing, but losers because their lovely island was deprived of its two biggest matches at a time when the public was most in need of rousing diversions. For them, however, the grandest of compensations awaited.
The opening ceremony was attended by more than 100,000 people, most of whom must have left wondering what on earth they had been watching. The laser show malfunctioned, the compre was embarrassing and the grand launch was a complete flop so much so that there were subsequent calls at Calcuttan government level for the arrest of the Pilcom convenor, Jagmohan Dalmiya, on a charge of wasting public money.
At 4 a.m. the following morning, four teams gathered blearily in the lobby of Calcuttas Oberoi hotel. They were all slated for the 6 a.m. flight to Delhi (Indias internal flights tend to run before dawn and after dusk), whereafter they were required to wait many hours before connecting to flights for their various first-game destinations. Had no one thought of organising a charter flight at a civilised hour? Apparently not.
Given this, the choice of the unlovely city of Ahmedabad, and the teams of England and New Zealand, for the opening game of the tournament, should perhaps not seem curious. It was, however, a deflating start, and not just for England, whose obsolete one-day tactics and lack of specific preparation for the only limited-overs event that matters were exposed from the beginning. England were destined to win only two games in the competition, both against non-league opposition, and one of those, against Holland, by an unflatteringly narrow margin. Their players had come to the event tired and unfocused, which was not entirely their fault, but the need for a progressive team manager to replace Raymond Illingworth became ever clearer as their ill-fated campaign continued. England once dictated the terms in one-day cricket; unnoticed by them, other countries have caught up and left them behind, developing new and innovative ways of overcoming the essentially negative restrictions of the overs game.
The use of pinch-hitters was one such method, much discussed and granted more significance than it merited, but it was certainly the case that the successful teams no longer looked to accrue the majority of their runs in the closing overs of their innings. Instead of settling for 60 or 70 runs from the initial 15 overs, when fielding restrictions applied, teams were now looking to pass the 100 mark. On the blissful batting pitches encountered here, it was seldom impossible. Sri Lanka, through their fearless openers, Sanath Jayasuriya later to be named the Most Valued Player of the Tournament and Romesh Kaluwitharana, were the trendsetters and, as the outcome proved, nobody did it better. Jayasuriyas assault on Englands bowling in the quarter-final at Faisalabad was authentic, aggressive batting without insult to the coaching manual.
There were some memorable images from the over-long group stages. Mark Taylors sportsmanship, in refusing to claim a slip catch at a pivotal stage against West Indies, was one; the imperious batting of Mark Waugh and Sachin Tendulkar provided more. But the majority involved the minnow nations. The best of them was the catch by Kenyas portly, bespectacled and none-too-nimble wicket-keeper, Tariq Iqbal, to dismiss Brian Lara. That it led to a Kenyan victory by 73 runs was part of the romance; here was the greatest upset the World Cup has known and, perhaps, a salutary lesson to a West Indies team that had become surly and unattractive. Kenya played their cricket as the West Indians once loved to do, without inhibition; defeat paradoxically restored pride to West Indies. They not only rallied to reach the last eight roused by 93 not out from their beleaguered captain, Richie Richardson, against Australia but, there, beat the team that had hitherto looked the slickest in the event, South Africa.
The two main host nations predictably reached the quarter-finals but it was not in the preferred script that they should meet each other so soon. Bangalore had the dubious honour of staging the game and this beautiful, bustling city has never known such an event. The fact that India won it, before an intensely partisan crowd, perhaps averted the kind of disgraceful scenes witnessed four days later in Calcutta, where Sri Lanka utterly outplayed the Indians. In the other semi-final, Australia recovered from an apparently hopeless position to beat West Indies, whose collective nerve crumbled.
Thus was created a meeting, in the final, between two teams who were prevented by politics and expediency from playing each other earlier. Sri Lankas victory was to the great approval and acclaim of much of the cricketing world. It was also a result that, to some degree, rescued this World Cup from an abiding image of bungling mediocrity.
The tournament achieved one aim in increasing the profile of cricket, through television coverage on an impressive but largely uncritical scale, and undoubtedly it satisfied the organisers in the amount of money accrued. But the impression was that the cricket was secondary to the commercialism. Even in a game newly awakened to its financial opportunities, that cannot be right.
Teams 12
Minnows Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates
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.
Innovations 15-over fielding restrictions had made their debut in 1992, but 1996 was the year the pinch-hitters really seized their opportunity. Sri Lanka, Australia and India exploited the wide open spaces with aggressive early batting. England didn't. The third umpire also made his first appearance in front of the TV monitor.
Early running Sri Lanka finished top of Group A despite beating only India of the fancied teams; Australia and West Indies forfeited their matches in Colombo rather than travel to a city where over 1000 people had been injured in a terrorist bomb only three weeks earlier. But South Africa were the clear favourites after five hyper-efficient victories in Group B. Gary Kirsten's 188 not out against UAE was a Cup record. England, meanwhile, lost all three of their games against Test nations, wobbled against Holland, and lost their lunch against UAE (at least, Neil Smith did).
The quarters Jayasuriya savaged England, who went down to their tenth successive defeat by a Test nation, but skipper Atherton got off lighter than Wasim Akram, who dropped out of Pakistan's tie with India, citing a side-strain. His Lahore house was stoned after they lost by 39 runs. A spectacular 130 from NZ's unheralded Chris Harris left Australia in need of their highest total batting second to win an ODI: Mark Waugh's record third hundred of the tournament (he had already become the first man to make successive Cup tons) made sure they got it. But the surprise packages were West Indies, as Lara's 111 inspired them to a 19-run win over South Africa.
The semis A Calcutta crowd of 110,000 boiled over as India slid to 120 for 8 in pursuit of Sri Lanka's 252. Fires were started in the stands, leading to a win "by default" for SL. India's decline had come as a surprise after Srinath removed ballistic openers Jayasuriya and Kaluwitharana in the first over, but de Silva's 66 led a recovery. That was nothing, however, when compared with Australia's comeback: they were 15 for 4 before Law and Bevan dragged them up to 207 for 8, then West Indies cruised to 165 for 2 in the 42nd over. But four wickets from Warne and some tactical wizardry from Mark Taylor precipitated an incredible collapse: West Indies lost 8 for 37 in 50 balls, and Richardson was stranded on 49 not out.
The final No-one had dominated a World Cup final to the extent that de Silva did here. He took two catches and three wickets, including Australia's top-scorers Taylor and Ponting, then strolled to an elegant 107 not out. Handicapped by a slippery, dew-covered ball, Australia dropped several chances, but never looked like defending 241.
Last hurrah Javed Miandad, the only man to play in every World Cup to date, finally bowed out. He batted three times, making 11*, 5, and 38 in the quarter-final. And Robin Smith's selectorial misfortune continued: he helped provide England's brightest moment, a record 147-run opening stand against Pakistan, and was dumped for good immediately after the tournament. It was also World Cup curtains for Richie Richardson, Roger Harper, Asanka Gurusinha, Ramiz Raja, Manoj Prabhakar, Phil DeFreitas, Dipak Patel, Andy Waller and Craig McDermott (three Cups each). McDermott bowled only three overs before returning home with a calf strain.
First hurrah Waqar Younis, surprisingly, was appearing in his first World Cup (back injury in 1992). Atherton and Gough made their debuts in the deflating defeat by New Zealand, for whom only four players had prior Cup experience. Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Ricky Ponting and Glenn McGrath added to growing reputations while Romesh Kaluwitharana is remembered as half of an all-conquering opening partnership, even though he made only 73 runs at 12.17.
Not to be forgotten Kenya beat West Indies in a qualifying match at Pune on Leap Year Day: Steve Tikolo, Kenya's only professional, top-scored with 29 out of 166, then Maurice Odumbe and Rajab Ali took three wickets apiece as West Indies crumbled for 93. The prize wicket of Brian Lara fell to a catch by portly, bespectacled keeper Tariq Iqbal; some thought it was the only ball he had held onto all day.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack report
There were some good, uplifting aspects to the sixth cricket World Cup, not least the style and smiles of its unsuspected winners, Sri Lanka, but overall this was not a tournament to linger fondly in the memory. Wounded by events beyond its control even before its opening, the competition proceeded to frustrate and bewilder through an interminable and largely irrelevant saga of group games in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka before hastening frantically through its knockout games in little more than a week.
The event was poorly conceived in its format and its logistics and suffered throughout from the threat and ultimately the reality of crowd disorder. The abandonment of the semi-final at Eden Gardens, Calcutta, following bottle-throwing and fire-lighting on the terraces, was a shameful reflection on standards of sportsmanship in an area until recently renowned for its appreciation of all things good in the game of cricket.
Perhaps, however, we should not be too harsh on the individuals responsible for the riot in Calcutta. They were merely responding to the seductions created for them by the promoters of the Wills World Cup, an event that plainly, disastrously, put money-making above all the fundamentals of organising a global sporting competition. As the glamorising of the Indian and Pakistani cricketers reached new and absurd heights, so too did the unshakeable belief of the masses in their invincibility. Defeat, of the kind that came to India that night in Calcutta, was popularly unimaginable, with consequences for which many must share the blame.
It was all markedly at odds with the 1987 World Cup, also co-hosted by India and Pakistan and widely judged to be an organisational triumph. Players and observers alike enjoyed that competition far more than the 1996 event. Yet the paradox is that, when the accounts were complete, they showed a negligible profit. Within a decade, the profile of the game had altered substantially; so too, it transpired, had the methods and ambitions of those charged with running the tournament. Suddenly, it was deemed more important to register a company as supplier of official chewing gum and take its money than to pay proper attention to the welfare of the competing teams. Of course, it is possible to become too nannyish about professional sportsmen, who by and large lead a pretty pampered existence, but the wearisome travel schedules, illogical playing itineraries and inadequate practice facilities inflicted on most of the visiting teams would have caused a serious rebellion had this been a football championship.
In fact, such elementary flaws should have been dealt with at source, long before they became a millstone around the event. The reason they were not the handing over by the International Cricket Council of all responsibility for the tournament to the World Cup committee, Pilcom reflects poorly on all those responsible. What function does ICC perform if it is not to be a vigilant monitor of events like this? Cricket must never permit such complacency again.
ICC must also take the blame for the format. The expansion of the field to 12, from nine in 1992, was quite right. By embracing three of ICCs Associate Members, the non-Test countries, the World Cup was fulfilling its missionary aim (though whether the Associates, wooed by financial guarantees, had too much say in the venue is another serious matter for ICC to consider). The problem arose when the extra teams were accommodated by a complete change from the successful 1992 system, a round-robin producing four semi-finalists. Instead, the teams were divided into two groups of six, from which not four but eight sides would proceed to the knockout rounds. The effect of this, obvious in advance, was to reduce virtually a month of cricket to the status of little more than practice games: duly, almost inevitably, the three Associate nations and the junior Test-playing team, Zimbabwe, were eliminated.
All this could have been avoided, and a genuinely competitive group programme installed, by discarding the idea of quarter-finals and going straight to a last four. Presumably, the attraction of four big crowds, four big television games, was too great, but this was a decision taken on flawed grounds. The people were not all fooled; the group games in Pakistan, particularly, drew very small crowds.
The logistical chaos of the competition stemmed largely from the decision, laudable in theory but utterly unrealistic, to spread the tournament to virtually every corner of the vast country of India. The 17 games scheduled for the country were all staged in different cities and insufficient attention had been paid to the practicalities of moving teams (let alone television crews and media people) between games. Travel in India is problematical at best; a few specific alterations were made to airline schedules to oblige the competition organisers but nowhere near enough to surmount the problem, the size of which became clear during the first, eventful weekend. The teams were all due to gather in Calcutta for a variety of briefing meetings before the much-vaunted opening ceremony, a celebration of technology for which the organisers had outlaid considerable capital.
As it transpired, however, the weekend was dominated by the issue of two teams, Australia and West Indies, adamantly refusing to play their scheduled group games in Colombo. The bomb blast in the city, a fortnight earlier, was the clinching factor, but Australias players were already uncomfortable about visiting Sri Lanka, with whom they had just played an acrimonious Test series. In truth, they were reluctant to participate in the Cup at all, the backwash of their bribery allegations against Salim Malik having brought threats of an unpleasant nature from a number of fanatics around Pakistan. West Indies had far less reason for prudence on the Colombo issue, but the condemnatory tone of the organisers against the two defectors gave the episode an unwarranted tone, intensified by a press conference that touched heights of incoherent rancour. It was even suggested that Australia and West Indies were indulging in a vendetta against the Third World, until it was gently pointed out, by ICCs chairman, Sir Clyde Walcott, that the Caribbean forms part of the Third World.
Positions being entrenched, the matches were forfeited, though it was a commentary on the cosiness of the format that Australia and West Indies could make such a sacrifice without seriously endangering their progress to the business end of the tournament. Sri Lanka were both winners and losers winners because they received four points, and a comfortable passage to the last eight, without playing, but losers because their lovely island was deprived of its two biggest matches at a time when the public was most in need of rousing diversions. For them, however, the grandest of compensations awaited.
The opening ceremony was attended by more than 100,000 people, most of whom must have left wondering what on earth they had been watching. The laser show malfunctioned, the compre was embarrassing and the grand launch was a complete flop so much so that there were subsequent calls at Calcuttan government level for the arrest of the Pilcom convenor, Jagmohan Dalmiya, on a charge of wasting public money.
At 4 a.m. the following morning, four teams gathered blearily in the lobby of Calcuttas Oberoi hotel. They were all slated for the 6 a.m. flight to Delhi (Indias internal flights tend to run before dawn and after dusk), whereafter they were required to wait many hours before connecting to flights for their various first-game destinations. Had no one thought of organising a charter flight at a civilised hour? Apparently not.
Given this, the choice of the unlovely city of Ahmedabad, and the teams of England and New Zealand, for the opening game of the tournament, should perhaps not seem curious. It was, however, a deflating start, and not just for England, whose obsolete one-day tactics and lack of specific preparation for the only limited-overs event that matters were exposed from the beginning. England were destined to win only two games in the competition, both against non-league opposition, and one of those, against Holland, by an unflatteringly narrow margin. Their players had come to the event tired and unfocused, which was not entirely their fault, but the need for a progressive team manager to replace Raymond Illingworth became ever clearer as their ill-fated campaign continued. England once dictated the terms in one-day cricket; unnoticed by them, other countries have caught up and left them behind, developing new and innovative ways of overcoming the essentially negative restrictions of the overs game.
The use of pinch-hitters was one such method, much discussed and granted more significance than it merited, but it was certainly the case that the successful teams no longer looked to accrue the majority of their runs in the closing overs of their innings. Instead of settling for 60 or 70 runs from the initial 15 overs, when fielding restrictions applied, teams were now looking to pass the 100 mark. On the blissful batting pitches encountered here, it was seldom impossible. Sri Lanka, through their fearless openers, Sanath Jayasuriya later to be named the Most Valued Player of the Tournament and Romesh Kaluwitharana, were the trendsetters and, as the outcome proved, nobody did it better. Jayasuriyas assault on Englands bowling in the quarter-final at Faisalabad was authentic, aggressive batting without insult to the coaching manual.
There were some memorable images from the over-long group stages. Mark Taylors sportsmanship, in refusing to claim a slip catch at a pivotal stage against West Indies, was one; the imperious batting of Mark Waugh and Sachin Tendulkar provided more. But the majority involved the minnow nations. The best of them was the catch by Kenyas portly, bespectacled and none-too-nimble wicket-keeper, Tariq Iqbal, to dismiss Brian Lara. That it led to a Kenyan victory by 73 runs was part of the romance; here was the greatest upset the World Cup has known and, perhaps, a salutary lesson to a West Indies team that had become surly and unattractive. Kenya played their cricket as the West Indians once loved to do, without inhibition; defeat paradoxically restored pride to West Indies. They not only rallied to reach the last eight roused by 93 not out from their beleaguered captain, Richie Richardson, against Australia but, there, beat the team that had hitherto looked the slickest in the event, South Africa.
The two main host nations predictably reached the quarter-finals but it was not in the preferred script that they should meet each other so soon. Bangalore had the dubious honour of staging the game and this beautiful, bustling city has never known such an event. The fact that India won it, before an intensely partisan crowd, perhaps averted the kind of disgraceful scenes witnessed four days later in Calcutta, where Sri Lanka utterly outplayed the Indians. In the other semi-final, Australia recovered from an apparently hopeless position to beat West Indies, whose collective nerve crumbled.
Thus was created a meeting, in the final, between two teams who were prevented by politics and expediency from playing each other earlier. Sri Lankas victory was to the great approval and acclaim of much of the cricketing world. It was also a result that, to some degree, rescued this World Cup from an abiding image of bungling mediocrity.
The tournament achieved one aim in increasing the profile of cricket, through television coverage on an impressive but largely uncritical scale, and undoubtedly it satisfied the organisers in the amount of money accrued. But the impression was that the cricket was secondary to the commercialism. Even in a game newly awakened to its financial opportunities, that cannot be right.
 |
| ICC World Cup, 1999 |
Australia win anti-climactic final
With about five playable hours of daylight remaining on the longest Sunday of the year, Darren Lehmann struck the ball towards the Lords Grand Stand for the boundary that gave the seventh World Cup to Australia.
This concluded a final so one-sided that it descended from anticlimax into bathos. A match that had started at 11.15, half an hour late, was all over by 4.35 because Pakistan, the most exciting side in the tournament, had gone to pieces when it mattered most. The first World Cup final, at Lords 24 years earlier almost to the day, had lasted nearly ten hours. This one was over shortly after it started. The nature of one-day cricket is such that two evenly matched teams can easily produce a lop-sided match, simply because of the breaks of the game. It was, however, true to the uniquely perverse nature of Pakistani cricket that it should happen to them on such an occasion. Thus the best Test team in the world became the world one-day champions, uniting the two forms of cricket into one undisputed title for the first time since West Indies lost their invincibility in the last Lords final 16 years before. Hindsight made it seem like manifest destiny. It was obvious all along, wasnt it? But it was nothing of the kind.
When Australia had gone to Old Trafford three Sundays earlier for their final group match, they were in severe danger of the earliest possible exit; two Sundays after that, during the last Super Six match, Australian journalists and officials had been making calls to check on airline seat availability, which would have been firmed up had Herschelle Gibbs not celebrated too soon and literally thrown away a catch offered by Steve Waugh.
In the semi-final four days later, as Damien Fleming prepared to bowl to Lance Klusener the player of the tournament with South Africa needing one to win, Australia were effectively goners. But that game, arguably the greatest in the history of one-day cricket, produced a final twist that no one could have foreseen or invented. Klusener and Allan Donald had a horrendous running mix-up, the match was tied, and Australia went through on net run-rate, of which, unfortunately, more later.
Australias improbable lurch into the final was in complete contrast to their opponents confident strut. The Pakistanis lost three successive games which did not matter, but returned to form in time to earn their place at Lords by blowing Zimbabwe and New Zealand away by huge margins. But it has been noticed before that the way to win World Cups and not just in cricket is to fiddle quietly through the early matches and peak at the end. This is a lesson South Africa, who blazed their way through the early stages of all three World Cups in the 1990s without ever reaching the final, urgently need to learn. It is, however, rather difficult to convert this observation into a strategy. Steve Waughs diamond-hardness, and the bowling gifts of Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, seem in retrospect like the determining factors of the 1999 World Cup. But it could so easily have been very, very different.
The overall quality of the Australian team meant that no one not even an Englishman could begrudge their right to the trophy. But Pakistan and South Africa would have been worthy winners too. The class of these three teams (one might add Indias batting as well) gave the tournament enough lustre to make the whole thing seem like a triumph. Five months later, the rugby World Cup, also held in Britain, was much nearer a flop.
Yet the success came against a background of travail almost as great as Australias. Englands main objective in staging the World Cup was to reinvigorate the nations love of the game, which had been flagging after so many years of failure by the national team. For the organisers, the worst-case scenario was that England would go out quickly.
By the time they had completed no-nonsense wins over Sri Lanka, Kenya and Zimbabwe, that fear had receded to vanishing point. Some newspapers claimed that England were already through to the Super Six stage. For them to fail, Zimbabwe had to beat South Africa, which in advance seemed improbable bordering on impossible, and then England had to lose to India very badly. It all happened. Only 16 days into the tournament, with a further 21 to go, England were gone. It was an outcome wholly in keeping with many of the farcical organisational aspects of the whole competition. The hosts were reduced to just that: handing round the cucumber sandwiches at their own tea party.
The fact that the tournament maintained public interest, even in England, in spite of this disaster, represented its greatest achievement. The fact that it got into such a pickle in the first place was its biggest failure. In previous World Cups, this situation could not have arisen. The system used in Australasia in 1992, when all played all in a round robin with the top four going into the semi-finals, was widely admired and enjoyed. But this became impossible once it was decided to admit the top three non-Test countries, making 12 teams in all. In 1996, a ludicrous format was employed whereby everyone meandered around the subcontinent for three weeks simply to reduce nine serious contenders to eight. Then the competition proper, in effect, was staged as a straight knockout over a week.
For 1999, Terry Blake, the ECB marketing director, introduced a novel method. 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.
It took a while for people to cotton on. Then a perception grew that this was all rather elegant. Finally, the flaws became obvious. Notionally, ties on points were to be resolved by the result between the teams involved. Unfortunately, there were three-way ties in both qualifying groups; and New Zealand and Zimbabwe, fourth and fifth in the Super Six, had shared the one washed-out game of the entire tournament. The next determinant was net run-rate, familiar for many years from one-day crickets triangulars and quadrangulars, but little understood, and impossible for the casual spectator to work out.
This vile technicality decided the whole tournament, since the tied semi-final was resolved by the teams positions in the Super Six, and net run-rate had put Australia ahead of South Africa. It would certainly make sense for future tournaments to use a more transparent tie-breaker: perhaps bonus points could be awarded according to the margin of victory. It might not sound ideal, but would be just as fair and much easier to follow.
The whole Super Six system had other problems, too. Zimbabwe began the second stage of the tournament top of the heap because they had beaten the teams that went through with them, but lost to two that got knocked out. It was hard to see the justice of this. The complexities turned one of the most enticing-looking games of the competition Australia v West Indies into a farce as both teams tried to manipulate the regulations to their advantage.
Net run-rate was responsible for the failure of both England and West Indies to reach the last six. Bad luck? To an extent. But if West Indies had won more quickly against Bangladesh they would have qualified. And it is hard to see why England, with their army of officials, and who did after all make the rules as hosts, were so slow to realise the dangers.
When their batting crumpled so forlornly against India at Edgbaston, allegedly their lucky ground, it seemed like the blackest day of all for English cricket. It was hard to see how the tournament could survive for three weeks as a major spectacle without the passion and patriotism that the presence of a home team provides. It did survive. The big idea was that the World Cup might instil a love of cricket into the hearts of English youngsters, a generation unengaged by the idea of supporting a team which has contrived, for instance, to lose the Ashes six times running. That has probably had to be postponed until the next World Cup in England: 2019 on present projections. But a lot of little ideas flourished instead.
England failures always seem like accidents waiting to happen. And, organisationally, the 1999 World Cup looked fated from the start. The ECB had turned against the idea of a sole sponsor and, as they announced long beforehand, wanted eight front-line corporate partners who would not have their name on the trophy but would commandeer all the prime advertising space. Unfortunately, they found only four, two of whom (NatWest and Vodafone) were already deeply committed as existing English cricket sponsors; another one (Pepsi) was interested only in striking a blow in the subcontinental cola wars; the fourth (Emirates Airlines) paid almost half in kind rather than cash, which represented not-always-convenient air tickets for the teams. When Outspan came on board as a subsidiary sponsor, a launch was arranged with the obligatory ephemeral celebrity, in this case a TV personality, Ms Anneka Rice, who let slip the fact that she thought cricket was as boring as fishing.
It was decided to start the tournament on May 14, desperately early in the English season. Not surprisingly, it began in drizzle, and with a quite pathetic opening ceremony. The Australian hired as tournament director, Michael Browning, specifically rejected the idea of one of those grandiloquent ceremonies that start Olympic Games, making old ladies gasp with admiration and hardened hacks groan. Instead, he went for the worst possible compromise, letting off a few cheap-looking fireworks and forcing several poor schoolgirls to stand around in the cold. The one simple, dignified, appropriate piece of ceremonial which should have been used, the 12 teams lining up in their blazers in front of the pavilion, was not. This was sad as well as stupid: there was no public moment when all the players involved were even seen to be part of the same event.
From then on, it was difficult to have any confidence at all in Mr Browning or his arrangements. Since these included a media bureaucracy notable for its dictatorial incompetence, many journalists were not going to give him the benefit of the doubt. (Local reporters with decades of experience were barred from press boxes by ignoramuses; it was rumoured, however, that a butcher from Chiswick was among those granted full accreditation.) The shortcomings were worsened by the slogan chosen. The World Cup, Browning and his staff insisted, was a Carnival of Cricket. It was a phrase that would come back to haunt them repeatedly. The trouble is that one mans carnival is another mans nightmare. It is difficult to find much accommodation between those who want to sit down and concentrate on the game, and those who want to shout, chant, cheer and sing. For English cricket, this is an intractable problem.
The old English custom of running on the field at the end of a match or sometimes earlier returned with gusto. Australia were spooked by this early on and demanded greater protection. No one in authority seemed clear where guidelines should be drawn. There was much mockery of the Trent Bridge authorities at the New Zealand India match for their undue strictness. Yet Indias previous match, at Old Trafford, had taken place amid fears of full-scale warfare: they were playing Pakistan at a time when the always-simmering conflict between the countries over Kashmir had boiled over into bloodshed. This match, heavily policed, passed off calmly. It was the next Old Trafford match the semi-final between Pakistan and New Zealand where a pitch invasion nearly led to disaster. Pakistani supporters were the most enthusiastic wearers of replica shirts; it was not helpful to the forces of order that their lime-green looked rather like stewards uniforms.
Given the briefness of the home teams involvement, it was the supporters of the other countries, and the Indians and Pakistanis in particular, who gave the World Cup its vibrancy. The bearded Pakistani cheerleader, Abdul Jalil, was by the end of the competition more recognisable than Steve Waugh. It began to be noticed that Asians in England were the one community who had absolutely not fallen out of love with cricket. And it began to be widely accepted that the Tebbit Test the idea, promulgated by the former Tory cabinet minister, that immigrants to Britain should switch their allegiance was inappropriate; their loyalties were an expression of their individuality, and a perfectly legitimate one.
The 21 grounds staging the 42 fixtures were slow to recognise the importance of the Asian audience; few, for instance, made any change to their catering arrangements. When Asian teams were not involved, different cultural priorities took over. The Australia v Scotland match smashed the record for bar takings at Worcester; it was easy to get a sandwich but the queue for beer stretched about halfway to Birmingham.
There was criticism of the decision to spread the games so widely, on grounds more accustomed to catering for a few dozen spectators. All the county headquarters staged at least one match, which meant debut one-day internationals for Hove and Northampton (both of which had opted not to take part in 1983), Canterbury and Cardiff (Tunbridge Wells and Swansea having been used last time) plus the new ground at Chester-le-Street. Three non-county grounds Edinburgh, Dublin and Amstelveen in Holland also joined the party. Clearly, many of these matches could have attracted bigger crowds on bigger grounds: Pakistan v Bangladesh at Northampton could have been sold at least three times over.
But English cricket has only six available stadia which can hold much more than 10,000 people. It would have been very tedious had they staged seven matches each, and would have done little for the wider cause of cricket. It is arguable that cricket would have made less money, since fewer people would have gone to their local fixtures. Nearly all the grounds coped extremely well with their big days: only Hove really seemed underequipped, and that merely proved what the clubs executive had been saying in favour of finding somewhere new. Floodlit cricket could have been tried but was unnecessary, since there were so few empty seats (except when the corporate hospitality types were finishing lunch) at any of the fixtures. In this regard, all the problems were those of success.
The greatest success, though, was the cricket. From the start, it took on a completely different flavour from the 1996 tournament. There was a huge meteorological risk attached to starting as early as May 14. It was an unnecessary risk too, because at 37 days the whole thing went on too long. In Britain, where there are no long distances to travel, it would have been perfectly possible, with just a little compression, to have cut it down to 30.
It was one of Britains greyer springs as well, and the warm-up games against the counties were very wet. But, miraculously, only one of the 42 matches in the actual tournament was left unfinished, only one other spilled over to the second day, and the dreaded Duckworth/Lewis system much talked about, little understood was never invoked. On top of net run-rate, that would have been too much to take. It was generally believed that the team batting second had an advantage because at 10.45 there was still early morning damp. In 27 of the games, the captain winning the toss inserted. In fact, the team batting first won 19 times and lost 21 times there was one tie and one no-result which proves nothing. Captains changed tack in June, when the sun came out: 24 of the insertions had occurred in the 30 group games.
The lacquered white ball was thought to be harder than the red one by batsmen who were hit by it. It often seemed to swing more, especially late in the innings. This was one reason for the astonishing number of wides, 979, called by umpires who were stern too stern, and often inconsistent about anything wide of off stump as well as leg. (One spread-betting firm estimated 240 to 260 wides in advance: "We have been caught out horribly," said a spokesman.) But it was hard to work out what was most responsible for the tone of the competition: the ball, the pitches or the atmospheric conditions.
What was certain was that the pattern established in the 1996 World Cup was turned upside down. The bowlers, reduced to mere helots by conditions in India and Pakistan, suddenly re-established themselves as equals of the batsmen, or even their masters. Little was heard or seen of pinch-hitters, and lashing the ball over the infield. Indeed, the end of the 15th over, when captains were allowed to place a more defensive field, often passed unnoticed. They had slips because their bowlers wanted them and could make use of them, and had no plans to move them anywhere.
Heroes became zeroes. Sanath Jayasuriya, the dominant figure of 1996, scored 82 in five matches. None of the Sri Lankans seemed capable of dealing with the changed situation and, after the South African quicks blew their batsmen away at Northampton, they never threatened to make the final six. The reigning champions were the least competitive of the nine Test-playing nations and Arjuna Ranatunga, their captain, paid with his job.
The other Test team who failed to qualify from Group A met the same response: Englands captain Alec Stewart was also sacked. His teams failure was altogether less explicable, since conditions were so much in their favour; indeed, that was the general idea. The bowlers, led by Darren Gough and Alan Mullally, exploited them well enough but, in the crucial matches against South Africa and India, the batsmen were abysmal. With hindsight, it was widely said that the dispute over payments which overshadowed the run-up to the tournament damaged the teams spirit. But actually the reasons were much more to do with lack of ability. England never resolved the all-rounder question which has bedevilled them since Ian Bothams retirement. Andrew Flintoff and Adam Hollioake failed to enhance their credentials as batsmen or bowlers. It became clear that any team short of a fifth quality bowler was going to struggle, and England had no credible No. 6 or 7 batsman available who fitted the bill.
Englands exit was so sudden that it took a while for people to realise that it also marked the final departure of their coach David Lloyd, who had announced earlier that he would be leaving after the World Cup. And, much to Lloyds distress, the grieving process in the dressing-room was interrupted by counties enquiring whether the result meant the immediate return of their star players.
West Indies were the other outright failures. Laras mighty efforts against Australia a few weeks earlier seemed very distant. They were a team of weary bowlers and under-achieving batsmen; their best player was the wicket-keeper, Ridley Jacobs, whose chief assets were competence and determination. It is impossible to imagine that he would have stood out in any West Indian side of the recent past.
The three makeweight teams emphasised that the gap between the worst of the nine Test sides and the best of the rest was enormous. The one great shock of the World Cup occurred in the final day of preliminary competition when Bangladesh, already eliminated, beat Pakistan, already qualified, in an extraordinary match at Northampton. Legal English bookmakers had rated Pakistan 33 to 1 on to win. Illegal Indian ones had apparently refused to take any bets on Pakistans preliminary matches because of the teams association with general hocus-pocus. Inevitably, this result led to rumours that it was fixed, because there was nothing at all in the run-up to suggest it was even feasible. However, no evidence was adduced to oppose the view that Pakistan, under-motivated, had simply had a bad day. Bangladesh certainly had a confusing one. The previous evening their coach, Gordon Greenidge, had been given the sack, after flirting with it several times before. He was at the game but slipped away at lunchtime, leaving the team in the care of officials.
Bangladesh also beat Scotland, and so finished a very respectable fifth in the Group B table. But this tournament did not advance the cause of the associate members. Kenya never looked like repeating their great win over West Indies in 1996, and were outplayed every time. Scotland were heavily dependent on the Yorkshire all-rounder Gavin Hamilton, who was selected a couple of months later for Englands winter tour. Once again, this suggested that the real chasm was between professional and non-professional cricket.
After these six teams had gone, a new incipient table was formed for the Super Six, incorporating the relevant results from the first phase. Zimbabwe almost had enough momentum to be carried into the semi-finals. They were saved by rain against New Zealand, who finally managed to secure some justice by beating India and squeezing Zimbabwe out on youll never guess net run-rate. Their opening batsman, Neil Johnson, was one of the successes of the tournament, and matched the Australians stroke-for-stroke in the Super Six game at Lords when Zimbabwe went down to defeat with great honour. They also deserve some kind of best-turned-out award: their flame-coloured uniform was the most handsome of the 12.
India (who were dressed bizarrely, wearing a motif that looked like the fins of some great fish) were always struggling to progress further because the results they carried through were both defeats. Though they won the private battle against Pakistan, they never had much chance of reaching the semi-finals. In a session of blazing hitting at Taunton, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly had proved that mornings were not necessarily the sole preserve of the bowlers. Dravid, until recently considered too slow for one-day cricket, was the leading scorer of the tournament, with 461. But India were disrupted early on when their star, Sachin Tendulkar, had to miss a game because of the death of his father. And they also suffered because their back-up bowling was weak.
So Zimbabwe and India went out, leaving the semi-finals to what people were beginning to regard as The Big Three plus New Zealand, who had quietly been doing just enough to keep in the contest, accompanied by a rumble from supporters back home against critics who said the team was boring. In fact, New Zealand won only one game of consequence, against Australia at Cardiff. Their other wins were against the makeweights and India, who had already been eliminated. They played shrewd cricket, and had bowling well suited to the conditions: Geoff Allott, with 20, shared with Shane Warne the title of leading wicket-taker.
Once they came up against a class team in prime form, however, they were exposed. Pakistan had lost three successive matches, but had judged their defeats so well that they still qualified at the top of the Super Six. And in the first semi-final they were devastating. This match turned traditional one-day theory on its head: it was decided by the unbridled pace of Shoaib Akhtar. Although he gave runs away, he regularly sent the Speedster over 90 mph and the opposing dressing-room into turmoil. Their batsmen, led by Saeed Anwar, had no trouble. Then there really were three.
Something had to give at Edgbaston. But it was hard to imagine who or what. South Africas coach, Bob Woolmer, had been forced to abandon his plans to give his captain, Hansie Cronje, instructions via an earpiece. But essentially his team stuck to their methods: athletic fielding, fierce if spin-free bowling, and all-round batting efficiency. Indeed, the most feared batsman of all had been marching in at No. 8 or 9. Klusener, one of the most successful bowlers in the Cup, had turned tail-end hitting into something close to an exact science.
This concluded a final so one-sided that it descended from anticlimax into bathos. A match that had started at 11.15, half an hour late, was all over by 4.35 because Pakistan, the most exciting side in the tournament, had gone to pieces when it mattered most. The first World Cup final, at Lords 24 years earlier almost to the day, had lasted nearly ten hours. This one was over shortly after it started. The nature of one-day cricket is such that two evenly matched teams can easily produce a lop-sided match, simply because of the breaks of the game. It was, however, true to the uniquely perverse nature of Pakistani cricket that it should happen to them on such an occasion. Thus the best Test team in the world became the world one-day champions, uniting the two forms of cricket into one undisputed title for the first time since West Indies lost their invincibility in the last Lords final 16 years before. Hindsight made it seem like manifest destiny. It was obvious all along, wasnt it? But it was nothing of the kind.
When Australia had gone to Old Trafford three Sundays earlier for their final group match, they were in severe danger of the earliest possible exit; two Sundays after that, during the last Super Six match, Australian journalists and officials had been making calls to check on airline seat availability, which would have been firmed up had Herschelle Gibbs not celebrated too soon and literally thrown away a catch offered by Steve Waugh.
In the semi-final four days later, as Damien Fleming prepared to bowl to Lance Klusener the player of the tournament with South Africa needing one to win, Australia were effectively goners. But that game, arguably the greatest in the history of one-day cricket, produced a final twist that no one could have foreseen or invented. Klusener and Allan Donald had a horrendous running mix-up, the match was tied, and Australia went through on net run-rate, of which, unfortunately, more later.
Australias improbable lurch into the final was in complete contrast to their opponents confident strut. The Pakistanis lost three successive games which did not matter, but returned to form in time to earn their place at Lords by blowing Zimbabwe and New Zealand away by huge margins. But it has been noticed before that the way to win World Cups and not just in cricket is to fiddle quietly through the early matches and peak at the end. This is a lesson South Africa, who blazed their way through the early stages of all three World Cups in the 1990s without ever reaching the final, urgently need to learn. It is, however, rather difficult to convert this observation into a strategy. Steve Waughs diamond-hardness, and the bowling gifts of Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, seem in retrospect like the determining factors of the 1999 World Cup. But it could so easily have been very, very different.
The overall quality of the Australian team meant that no one not even an Englishman could begrudge their right to the trophy. But Pakistan and South Africa would have been worthy winners too. The class of these three teams (one might add Indias batting as well) gave the tournament enough lustre to make the whole thing seem like a triumph. Five months later, the rugby World Cup, also held in Britain, was much nearer a flop.
Yet the success came against a background of travail almost as great as Australias. Englands main objective in staging the World Cup was to reinvigorate the nations love of the game, which had been flagging after so many years of failure by the national team. For the organisers, the worst-case scenario was that England would go out quickly.
By the time they had completed no-nonsense wins over Sri Lanka, Kenya and Zimbabwe, that fear had receded to vanishing point. Some newspapers claimed that England were already through to the Super Six stage. For them to fail, Zimbabwe had to beat South Africa, which in advance seemed improbable bordering on impossible, and then England had to lose to India very badly. It all happened. Only 16 days into the tournament, with a further 21 to go, England were gone. It was an outcome wholly in keeping with many of the farcical organisational aspects of the whole competition. The hosts were reduced to just that: handing round the cucumber sandwiches at their own tea party.
The fact that the tournament maintained public interest, even in England, in spite of this disaster, represented its greatest achievement. The fact that it got into such a pickle in the first place was its biggest failure. In previous World Cups, this situation could not have arisen. The system used in Australasia in 1992, when all played all in a round robin with the top four going into the semi-finals, was widely admired and enjoyed. But this became impossible once it was decided to admit the top three non-Test countries, making 12 teams in all. In 1996, a ludicrous format was employed whereby everyone meandered around the subcontinent for three weeks simply to reduce nine serious contenders to eight. Then the competition proper, in effect, was staged as a straight knockout over a week.
For 1999, Terry Blake, the ECB marketing director, introduced a novel method. 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.
It took a while for people to cotton on. Then a perception grew that this was all rather elegant. Finally, the flaws became obvious. Notionally, ties on points were to be resolved by the result between the teams involved. Unfortunately, there were three-way ties in both qualifying groups; and New Zealand and Zimbabwe, fourth and fifth in the Super Six, had shared the one washed-out game of the entire tournament. The next determinant was net run-rate, familiar for many years from one-day crickets triangulars and quadrangulars, but little understood, and impossible for the casual spectator to work out.
This vile technicality decided the whole tournament, since the tied semi-final was resolved by the teams positions in the Super Six, and net run-rate had put Australia ahead of South Africa. It would certainly make sense for future tournaments to use a more transparent tie-breaker: perhaps bonus points could be awarded according to the margin of victory. It might not sound ideal, but would be just as fair and much easier to follow.
The whole Super Six system had other problems, too. Zimbabwe began the second stage of the tournament top of the heap because they had beaten the teams that went through with them, but lost to two that got knocked out. It was hard to see the justice of this. The complexities turned one of the most enticing-looking games of the competition Australia v West Indies into a farce as both teams tried to manipulate the regulations to their advantage.
Net run-rate was responsible for the failure of both England and West Indies to reach the last six. Bad luck? To an extent. But if West Indies had won more quickly against Bangladesh they would have qualified. And it is hard to see why England, with their army of officials, and who did after all make the rules as hosts, were so slow to realise the dangers.
When their batting crumpled so forlornly against India at Edgbaston, allegedly their lucky ground, it seemed like the blackest day of all for English cricket. It was hard to see how the tournament could survive for three weeks as a major spectacle without the passion and patriotism that the presence of a home team provides. It did survive. The big idea was that the World Cup might instil a love of cricket into the hearts of English youngsters, a generation unengaged by the idea of supporting a team which has contrived, for instance, to lose the Ashes six times running. That has probably had to be postponed until the next World Cup in England: 2019 on present projections. But a lot of little ideas flourished instead.
England failures always seem like accidents waiting to happen. And, organisationally, the 1999 World Cup looked fated from the start. The ECB had turned against the idea of a sole sponsor and, as they announced long beforehand, wanted eight front-line corporate partners who would not have their name on the trophy but would commandeer all the prime advertising space. Unfortunately, they found only four, two of whom (NatWest and Vodafone) were already deeply committed as existing English cricket sponsors; another one (Pepsi) was interested only in striking a blow in the subcontinental cola wars; the fourth (Emirates Airlines) paid almost half in kind rather than cash, which represented not-always-convenient air tickets for the teams. When Outspan came on board as a subsidiary sponsor, a launch was arranged with the obligatory ephemeral celebrity, in this case a TV personality, Ms Anneka Rice, who let slip the fact that she thought cricket was as boring as fishing.
It was decided to start the tournament on May 14, desperately early in the English season. Not surprisingly, it began in drizzle, and with a quite pathetic opening ceremony. The Australian hired as tournament director, Michael Browning, specifically rejected the idea of one of those grandiloquent ceremonies that start Olympic Games, making old ladies gasp with admiration and hardened hacks groan. Instead, he went for the worst possible compromise, letting off a few cheap-looking fireworks and forcing several poor schoolgirls to stand around in the cold. The one simple, dignified, appropriate piece of ceremonial which should have been used, the 12 teams lining up in their blazers in front of the pavilion, was not. This was sad as well as stupid: there was no public moment when all the players involved were even seen to be part of the same event.
From then on, it was difficult to have any confidence at all in Mr Browning or his arrangements. Since these included a media bureaucracy notable for its dictatorial incompetence, many journalists were not going to give him the benefit of the doubt. (Local reporters with decades of experience were barred from press boxes by ignoramuses; it was rumoured, however, that a butcher from Chiswick was among those granted full accreditation.) The shortcomings were worsened by the slogan chosen. The World Cup, Browning and his staff insisted, was a Carnival of Cricket. It was a phrase that would come back to haunt them repeatedly. The trouble is that one mans carnival is another mans nightmare. It is difficult to find much accommodation between those who want to sit down and concentrate on the game, and those who want to shout, chant, cheer and sing. For English cricket, this is an intractable problem.
The old English custom of running on the field at the end of a match or sometimes earlier returned with gusto. Australia were spooked by this early on and demanded greater protection. No one in authority seemed clear where guidelines should be drawn. There was much mockery of the Trent Bridge authorities at the New Zealand India match for their undue strictness. Yet Indias previous match, at Old Trafford, had taken place amid fears of full-scale warfare: they were playing Pakistan at a time when the always-simmering conflict between the countries over Kashmir had boiled over into bloodshed. This match, heavily policed, passed off calmly. It was the next Old Trafford match the semi-final between Pakistan and New Zealand where a pitch invasion nearly led to disaster. Pakistani supporters were the most enthusiastic wearers of replica shirts; it was not helpful to the forces of order that their lime-green looked rather like stewards uniforms.
Given the briefness of the home teams involvement, it was the supporters of the other countries, and the Indians and Pakistanis in particular, who gave the World Cup its vibrancy. The bearded Pakistani cheerleader, Abdul Jalil, was by the end of the competition more recognisable than Steve Waugh. It began to be noticed that Asians in England were the one community who had absolutely not fallen out of love with cricket. And it began to be widely accepted that the Tebbit Test the idea, promulgated by the former Tory cabinet minister, that immigrants to Britain should switch their allegiance was inappropriate; their loyalties were an expression of their individuality, and a perfectly legitimate one.
The 21 grounds staging the 42 fixtures were slow to recognise the importance of the Asian audience; few, for instance, made any change to their catering arrangements. When Asian teams were not involved, different cultural priorities took over. The Australia v Scotland match smashed the record for bar takings at Worcester; it was easy to get a sandwich but the queue for beer stretched about halfway to Birmingham.
There was criticism of the decision to spread the games so widely, on grounds more accustomed to catering for a few dozen spectators. All the county headquarters staged at least one match, which meant debut one-day internationals for Hove and Northampton (both of which had opted not to take part in 1983), Canterbury and Cardiff (Tunbridge Wells and Swansea having been used last time) plus the new ground at Chester-le-Street. Three non-county grounds Edinburgh, Dublin and Amstelveen in Holland also joined the party. Clearly, many of these matches could have attracted bigger crowds on bigger grounds: Pakistan v Bangladesh at Northampton could have been sold at least three times over.
But English cricket has only six available stadia which can hold much more than 10,000 people. It would have been very tedious had they staged seven matches each, and would have done little for the wider cause of cricket. It is arguable that cricket would have made less money, since fewer people would have gone to their local fixtures. Nearly all the grounds coped extremely well with their big days: only Hove really seemed underequipped, and that merely proved what the clubs executive had been saying in favour of finding somewhere new. Floodlit cricket could have been tried but was unnecessary, since there were so few empty seats (except when the corporate hospitality types were finishing lunch) at any of the fixtures. In this regard, all the problems were those of success.
The greatest success, though, was the cricket. From the start, it took on a completely different flavour from the 1996 tournament. There was a huge meteorological risk attached to starting as early as May 14. It was an unnecessary risk too, because at 37 days the whole thing went on too long. In Britain, where there are no long distances to travel, it would have been perfectly possible, with just a little compression, to have cut it down to 30.
It was one of Britains greyer springs as well, and the warm-up games against the counties were very wet. But, miraculously, only one of the 42 matches in the actual tournament was left unfinished, only one other spilled over to the second day, and the dreaded Duckworth/Lewis system much talked about, little understood was never invoked. On top of net run-rate, that would have been too much to take. It was generally believed that the team batting second had an advantage because at 10.45 there was still early morning damp. In 27 of the games, the captain winning the toss inserted. In fact, the team batting first won 19 times and lost 21 times there was one tie and one no-result which proves nothing. Captains changed tack in June, when the sun came out: 24 of the insertions had occurred in the 30 group games.
The lacquered white ball was thought to be harder than the red one by batsmen who were hit by it. It often seemed to swing more, especially late in the innings. This was one reason for the astonishing number of wides, 979, called by umpires who were stern too stern, and often inconsistent about anything wide of off stump as well as leg. (One spread-betting firm estimated 240 to 260 wides in advance: "We have been caught out horribly," said a spokesman.) But it was hard to work out what was most responsible for the tone of the competition: the ball, the pitches or the atmospheric conditions.
What was certain was that the pattern established in the 1996 World Cup was turned upside down. The bowlers, reduced to mere helots by conditions in India and Pakistan, suddenly re-established themselves as equals of the batsmen, or even their masters. Little was heard or seen of pinch-hitters, and lashing the ball over the infield. Indeed, the end of the 15th over, when captains were allowed to place a more defensive field, often passed unnoticed. They had slips because their bowlers wanted them and could make use of them, and had no plans to move them anywhere.
Heroes became zeroes. Sanath Jayasuriya, the dominant figure of 1996, scored 82 in five matches. None of the Sri Lankans seemed capable of dealing with the changed situation and, after the South African quicks blew their batsmen away at Northampton, they never threatened to make the final six. The reigning champions were the least competitive of the nine Test-playing nations and Arjuna Ranatunga, their captain, paid with his job.
The other Test team who failed to qualify from Group A met the same response: Englands captain Alec Stewart was also sacked. His teams failure was altogether less explicable, since conditions were so much in their favour; indeed, that was the general idea. The bowlers, led by Darren Gough and Alan Mullally, exploited them well enough but, in the crucial matches against South Africa and India, the batsmen were abysmal. With hindsight, it was widely said that the dispute over payments which overshadowed the run-up to the tournament damaged the teams spirit. But actually the reasons were much more to do with lack of ability. England never resolved the all-rounder question which has bedevilled them since Ian Bothams retirement. Andrew Flintoff and Adam Hollioake failed to enhance their credentials as batsmen or bowlers. It became clear that any team short of a fifth quality bowler was going to struggle, and England had no credible No. 6 or 7 batsman available who fitted the bill.
Englands exit was so sudden that it took a while for people to realise that it also marked the final departure of their coach David Lloyd, who had announced earlier that he would be leaving after the World Cup. And, much to Lloyds distress, the grieving process in the dressing-room was interrupted by counties enquiring whether the result meant the immediate return of their star players.
West Indies were the other outright failures. Laras mighty efforts against Australia a few weeks earlier seemed very distant. They were a team of weary bowlers and under-achieving batsmen; their best player was the wicket-keeper, Ridley Jacobs, whose chief assets were competence and determination. It is impossible to imagine that he would have stood out in any West Indian side of the recent past.
The three makeweight teams emphasised that the gap between the worst of the nine Test sides and the best of the rest was enormous. The one great shock of the World Cup occurred in the final day of preliminary competition when Bangladesh, already eliminated, beat Pakistan, already qualified, in an extraordinary match at Northampton. Legal English bookmakers had rated Pakistan 33 to 1 on to win. Illegal Indian ones had apparently refused to take any bets on Pakistans preliminary matches because of the teams association with general hocus-pocus. Inevitably, this result led to rumours that it was fixed, because there was nothing at all in the run-up to suggest it was even feasible. However, no evidence was adduced to oppose the view that Pakistan, under-motivated, had simply had a bad day. Bangladesh certainly had a confusing one. The previous evening their coach, Gordon Greenidge, had been given the sack, after flirting with it several times before. He was at the game but slipped away at lunchtime, leaving the team in the care of officials.
Bangladesh also beat Scotland, and so finished a very respectable fifth in the Group B table. But this tournament did not advance the cause of the associate members. Kenya never looked like repeating their great win over West Indies in 1996, and were outplayed every time. Scotland were heavily dependent on the Yorkshire all-rounder Gavin Hamilton, who was selected a couple of months later for Englands winter tour. Once again, this suggested that the real chasm was between professional and non-professional cricket.
After these six teams had gone, a new incipient table was formed for the Super Six, incorporating the relevant results from the first phase. Zimbabwe almost had enough momentum to be carried into the semi-finals. They were saved by rain against New Zealand, who finally managed to secure some justice by beating India and squeezing Zimbabwe out on youll never guess net run-rate. Their opening batsman, Neil Johnson, was one of the successes of the tournament, and matched the Australians stroke-for-stroke in the Super Six game at Lords when Zimbabwe went down to defeat with great honour. They also deserve some kind of best-turned-out award: their flame-coloured uniform was the most handsome of the 12.
India (who were dressed bizarrely, wearing a motif that looked like the fins of some great fish) were always struggling to progress further because the results they carried through were both defeats. Though they won the private battle against Pakistan, they never had much chance of reaching the semi-finals. In a session of blazing hitting at Taunton, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly had proved that mornings were not necessarily the sole preserve of the bowlers. Dravid, until recently considered too slow for one-day cricket, was the leading scorer of the tournament, with 461. But India were disrupted early on when their star, Sachin Tendulkar, had to miss a game because of the death of his father. And they also suffered because their back-up bowling was weak.
So Zimbabwe and India went out, leaving the semi-finals to what people were beginning to regard as The Big Three plus New Zealand, who had quietly been doing just enough to keep in the contest, accompanied by a rumble from supporters back home against critics who said the team was boring. In fact, New Zealand won only one game of consequence, against Australia at Cardiff. Their other wins were against the makeweights and India, who had already been eliminated. They played shrewd cricket, and had bowling well suited to the conditions: Geoff Allott, with 20, shared with Shane Warne the title of leading wicket-taker.
Once they came up against a class team in prime form, however, they were exposed. Pakistan had lost three successive matches, but had judged their defeats so well that they still qualified at the top of the Super Six. And in the first semi-final they were devastating. This match turned traditional one-day theory on its head: it was decided by the unbridled pace of Shoaib Akhtar. Although he gave runs away, he regularly sent the Speedster over 90 mph and the opposing dressing-room into turmoil. Their batsmen, led by Saeed Anwar, had no trouble. Then there really were three.
Something had to give at Edgbaston. But it was hard to imagine who or what. South Africas coach, Bob Woolmer, had been forced to abandon his plans to give his captain, Hansie Cronje, instructions via an earpiece. But essentially his team stuck to their methods: athletic fielding, fierce if spin-free bowling, and all-round batting efficiency. Indeed, the most feared batsman of all had been marching in at No. 8 or 9. Klusener, one of the most successful bowlers in the Cup, had turned tail-end hitting into something close to an exact science.
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| World Cup Final 2003 - India Vs Australia |
Superb Australia leave others trailing
With about five playable hours of daylight remaining on the longest Sunday of the year, Darren Lehmann struck the ball towards the Lords Grand Stand for the boundary that gave the seventh World Cup to Australia.
This concluded a final so one-sided that it descended from anticlimax into bathos. A match that had started at 11.15, half an hour late, was all over by 4.35 because Pakistan, the most exciting side in the tournament, had gone to pieces when it mattered most. The first World Cup final, at Lords 24 years earlier almost to the day, had lasted nearly ten hours. This one was over shortly after it started. The nature of one-day cricket is such that two evenly matched teams can easily produce a lop-sided match, simply because of the breaks of the game. It was, however, true to the uniquely perverse nature of Pakistani cricket that it should happen to them on such an occasion. Thus the best Test team in the world became the world one-day champions, uniting the two forms of cricket into one undisputed title for the first time since West Indies lost their invincibility in the last Lords final 16 years before. Hindsight made it seem like manifest destiny. It was obvious all along, wasnt it? But it was nothing of the kind.
When Australia had gone to Old Trafford three Sundays earlier for their final group match, they were in severe danger of the earliest possible exit; two Sundays after that, during the last Super Six match, Australian journalists and officials had been making calls to check on airline seat availability, which would have been firmed up had Herschelle Gibbs not celebrated too soon and literally thrown away a catch offered by Steve Waugh.
In the semi-final four days later, as Damien Fleming prepared to bowl to Lance Klusener the player of the tournament with South Africa needing one to win, Australia were effectively goners. But that game, arguably the greatest in the history of one-day cricket, produced a final twist that no one could have foreseen or invented. Klusener and Allan Donald had a horrendous running mix-up, the match was tied, and Australia went through on net run-rate, of which, unfortunately, more later.
Australias improbable lurch into the final was in complete contrast to their opponents confident strut. The Pakistanis lost three successive games which did not matter, but returned to form in time to earn their place at Lords by blowing Zimbabwe and New Zealand away by huge margins. But it has been noticed before that the way to win World Cups and not just in cricket is to fiddle quietly through the early matches and peak at the end. This is a lesson South Africa, who blazed their way through the early stages of all three World Cups in the 1990s without ever reaching the final, urgently need to learn. It is, however, rather difficult to convert this observation into a strategy. Steve Waughs diamond-hardness, and the bowling gifts of Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, seem in retrospect like the determining factors of the 1999 World Cup. But it could so easily have been very, very different.
The overall quality of the Australian team meant that no one not even an Englishman could begrudge their right to the trophy. But Pakistan and South Africa would have been worthy winners too. The class of these three teams (one might add Indias batting as well) gave the tournament enough lustre to make the whole thing seem like a triumph. Five months later, the rugby World Cup, also held in Britain, was much nearer a flop.
Yet the success came against a background of travail almost as great as Australias. Englands main objective in staging the World Cup was to reinvigorate the nations love of the game, which had been flagging after so many years of failure by the national team. For the organisers, the worst-case scenario was that England would go out quickly.
By the time they had completed no-nonsense wins over Sri Lanka, Kenya and Zimbabwe, that fear had receded to vanishing point. Some newspapers claimed that England were already through to the Super Six stage. For them to fail, Zimbabwe had to beat South Africa, which in advance seemed improbable bordering on impossible, and then England had to lose to India very badly. It all happened. Only 16 days into the tournament, with a further 21 to go, England were gone. It was an outcome wholly in keeping with many of the farcical organisational aspects of the whole competition. The hosts were reduced to just that: handing round the cucumber sandwiches at their own tea party.
The fact that the tournament maintained public interest, even in England, in spite of this disaster, represented its greatest achievement. The fact that it got into such a pickle in the first place was its biggest failure. In previous World Cups, this situation could not have arisen. The system used in Australasia in 1992, when all played all in a round robin with the top four going into the semi-finals, was widely admired and enjoyed. But this became impossible once it was decided to admit the top three non-Test countries, making 12 teams in all. In 1996, a ludicrous format was employed whereby everyone meandered around the subcontinent for three weeks simply to reduce nine serious contenders to eight. Then the competition proper, in effect, was staged as a straight knockout over a week.
For 1999, Terry Blake, the ECB marketing director, introduced a novel method. 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.
It took a while for people to cotton on. Then a perception grew that this was all rather elegant. Finally, the flaws became obvious. Notionally, ties on points were to be resolved by the result between the teams involved. Unfortunately, there were three-way ties in both qualifying groups; and New Zealand and Zimbabwe, fourth and fifth in the Super Six, had shared the one washed-out game of the entire tournament. The next determinant was net run-rate, familiar for many years from one-day crickets triangulars and quadrangulars, but little understood, and impossible for the casual spectator to work out.
This vile technicality decided the whole tournament, since the tied semi-final was resolved by the teams positions in the Super Six, and net run-rate had put Australia ahead of South Africa. It would certainly make sense for future tournaments to use a more transparent tie-breaker: perhaps bonus points could be awarded according to the margin of victory. It might not sound ideal, but would be just as fair and much easier to follow.
The whole Super Six system had other problems, too. Zimbabwe began the second stage of the tournament top of the heap because they had beaten the teams that went through with them, but lost to two that got knocked out. It was hard to see the justice of this. The complexities turned one of the most enticing-looking games of the competition Australia v West Indies into a farce as both teams tried to manipulate the regulations to their advantage.
Net run-rate was responsible for the failure of both England and West Indies to reach the last six. Bad luck? To an extent. But if West Indies had won more quickly against Bangladesh they would have qualified. And it is hard to see why England, with their army of officials, and who did after all make the rules as hosts, were so slow to realise the dangers.
When their batting crumpled so forlornly against India at Edgbaston, allegedly their lucky ground, it seemed like the blackest day of all for English cricket. It was hard to see how the tournament could survive for three weeks as a major spectacle without the passion and patriotism that the presence of a home team provides. It did survive. The big idea was that the World Cup might instil a love of cricket into the hearts of English youngsters, a generation unengaged by the idea of supporting a team which has contrived, for instance, to lose the Ashes six times running. That has probably had to be postponed until the next World Cup in England: 2019 on present projections. But a lot of little ideas flourished instead.
England failures always seem like accidents waiting to happen. And, organisationally, the 1999 World Cup looked fated from the start. The ECB had turned against the idea of a sole sponsor and, as they announced long beforehand, wanted eight front-line corporate partners who would not have their name on the trophy but would commandeer all the prime advertising space. Unfortunately, they found only four, two of whom (NatWest and Vodafone) were already deeply committed as existing English cricket sponsors; another one (Pepsi) was interested only in striking a blow in the subcontinental cola wars; the fourth (Emirates Airlines) paid almost half in kind rather than cash, which represented not-always-convenient air tickets for the teams. When Outspan came on board as a subsidiary sponsor, a launch was arranged with the obligatory ephemeral celebrity, in this case a TV personality, Ms Anneka Rice, who let slip the fact that she thought cricket was as boring as fishing.
It was decided to start the tournament on May 14, desperately early in the English season. Not surprisingly, it began in drizzle, and with a quite pathetic opening ceremony. The Australian hired as tournament director, Michael Browning, specifically rejected the idea of one of those grandiloquent ceremonies that start Olympic Games, making old ladies gasp with admiration and hardened hacks groan. Instead, he went for the worst possible compromise, letting off a few cheap-looking fireworks and forcing several poor schoolgirls to stand around in the cold. The one simple, dignified, appropriate piece of ceremonial which should have been used, the 12 teams lining up in their blazers in front of the pavilion, was not. This was sad as well as stupid: there was no public moment when all the players involved were even seen to be part of the same event.
From then on, it was difficult to have any confidence at all in Mr Browning or his arrangements. Since these included a media bureaucracy notable for its dictatorial incompetence, many journalists were not going to give him the benefit of the doubt. (Local reporters with decades of experience were barred from press boxes by ignoramuses; it was rumoured, however, that a butcher from Chiswick was among those granted full accreditation.) The shortcomings were worsened by the slogan chosen. The World Cup, Browning and his staff insisted, was a Carnival of Cricket. It was a phrase that would come back to haunt them repeatedly. The trouble is that one mans carnival is another mans nightmare. It is difficult to find much accommodation between those who want to sit down and concentrate on the game, and those who want to shout, chant, cheer and sing. For English cricket, this is an intractable problem.
The old English custom of running on the field at the end of a match or sometimes earlier returned with gusto. Australia were spooked by this early on and demanded greater protection. No one in authority seemed clear where guidelines should be drawn. There was much mockery of the Trent Bridge authorities at the New Zealand India match for their undue strictness. Yet Indias previous match, at Old Trafford, had taken place amid fears of full-scale warfare: they were playing Pakistan at a time when the always-simmering conflict between the countries over Kashmir had boiled over into bloodshed. This match, heavily policed, passed off calmly. It was the next Old Trafford match the semi-final between Pakistan and New Zealand where a pitch invasion nearly led to disaster. Pakistani supporters were the most enthusiastic wearers of replica shirts; it was not helpful to the forces of order that their lime-green looked rather like stewards uniforms.
Given the briefness of the home teams involvement, it was the supporters of the other countries, and the Indians and Pakistanis in particular, who gave the World Cup its vibrancy. The bearded Pakistani cheerleader, Abdul Jalil, was by the end of the competition more recognisable than Steve Waugh. It began to be noticed that Asians in England were the one community who had absolutely not fallen out of love with cricket. And it began to be widely accepted that the Tebbit Test the idea, promulgated by the former Tory cabinet minister, that immigrants to Britain should switch their allegiance was inappropriate; their loyalties were an expression of their individuality, and a perfectly legitimate one.
The 21 grounds staging the 42 fixtures were slow to recognise the importance of the Asian audience; few, for instance, made any change to their catering arrangements. When Asian teams were not involved, different cultural priorities took over. The Australia v Scotland match smashed the record for bar takings at Worcester; it was easy to get a sandwich but the queue for beer stretched about halfway to Birmingham.
There was criticism of the decision to spread the games so widely, on grounds more accustomed to catering for a few dozen spectators. All the county headquarters staged at least one match, which meant debut one-day internationals for Hove and Northampton (both of which had opted not to take part in 1983), Canterbury and Cardiff (Tunbridge Wells and Swansea having been used last time) plus the new ground at Chester-le-Street. Three non-county grounds Edinburgh, Dublin and Amstelveen in Holland also joined the party. Clearly, many of these matches could have attracted bigger crowds on bigger grounds: Pakistan v Bangladesh at Northampton could have been sold at least three times over.
But English cricket has only six available stadia which can hold much more than 10,000 people. It would have been very tedious had they staged seven matches each, and would have done little for the wider cause of cricket. It is arguable that cricket would have made less money, since fewer people would have gone to their local fixtures. Nearly all the grounds coped extremely well with their big days: only Hove really seemed underequipped, and that merely proved what the clubs executive had been saying in favour of finding somewhere new. Floodlit cricket could have been tried but was unnecessary, since there were so few empty seats (except when the corporate hospitality types were finishing lunch) at any of the fixtures. In this regard, all the problems were those of success.
The greatest success, though, was the cricket. From the start, it took on a completely different flavour from the 1996 tournament. There was a huge meteorological risk attached to starting as early as May 14. It was an unnecessary risk too, because at 37 days the whole thing went on too long. In Britain, where there are no long distances to travel, it would have been perfectly possible, with just a little compression, to have cut it down to 30.
It was one of Britains greyer springs as well, and the warm-up games against the counties were very wet. But, miraculously, only one of the 42 matches in the actual tournament was left unfinished, only one other spilled over to the second day, and the dreaded Duckworth/Lewis system much talked about, little understood was never invoked. On top of net run-rate, that would have been too much to take. It was generally believed that the team batting second had an advantage because at 10.45 there was still early morning damp. In 27 of the games, the captain winning the toss inserted. In fact, the team batting first won 19 times and lost 21 times there was one tie and one no-result which proves nothing. Captains changed tack in June, when the sun came out: 24 of the insertions had occurred in the 30 group games.
The lacquered white ball was thought to be harder than the red one by batsmen who were hit by it. It often seemed to swing more, especially late in the innings. This was one reason for the astonishing number of wides, 979, called by umpires who were stern too stern, and often inconsistent about anything wide of off stump as well as leg. (One spread-betting firm estimated 240 to 260 wides in advance: "We have been caught out horribly," said a spokesman.) But it was hard to work out what was most responsible for the tone of the competition: the ball, the pitches or the atmospheric conditions.
What was certain was that the pattern established in the 1996 World Cup was turned upside down. The bowlers, reduced to mere helots by conditions in India and Pakistan, suddenly re-established themselves as equals of the batsmen, or even their masters. Little was heard or seen of pinch-hitters, and lashing the ball over the infield. Indeed, the end of the 15th over, when captains were allowed to place a more defensive field, often passed unnoticed. They had slips because their bowlers wanted them and could make use of them, and had no plans to move them anywhere.
Heroes became zeroes. Sanath Jayasuriya, the dominant figure of 1996, scored 82 in five matches. None of the Sri Lankans seemed capable of dealing with the changed situation and, after the South African quicks blew their batsmen away at Northampton, they never threatened to make the final six. The reigning champions were the least competitive of the nine Test-playing nations and Arjuna Ranatunga, their captain, paid with his job.
The other Test team who failed to qualify from Group A met the same response: Englands captain Alec Stewart was also sacked. His teams failure was altogether less explicable, since conditions were so much in their favour; indeed, that was the general idea. The bowlers, led by Darren Gough and Alan Mullally, exploited them well enough but, in the crucial matches against South Africa and India, the batsmen were abysmal. With hindsight, it was widely said that the dispute over payments which overshadowed the run-up to the tournament damaged the teams spirit. But actually the reasons were much more to do with lack of ability. England never resolved the all-rounder question which has bedevilled them since Ian Bothams retirement. Andrew Flintoff and Adam Hollioake failed to enhance their credentials as batsmen or bowlers. It became clear that any team short of a fifth quality bowler was going to struggle, and England had no credible No. 6 or 7 batsman available who fitted the bill.
Englands exit was so sudden that it took a while for people to realise that it also marked the final departure of their coach David Lloyd, who had announced earlier that he would be leaving after the World Cup. And, much to Lloyds distress, the grieving process in the dressing-room was interrupted by counties enquiring whether the result meant the immediate return of their star players.
West Indies were the other outright failures. Laras mighty efforts against Australia a few weeks earlier seemed very distant. They were a team of weary bowlers and under-achieving batsmen; their best player was the wicket-keeper, Ridley Jacobs, whose chief assets were competence and determination. It is impossible to imagine that he would have stood out in any West Indian side of the recent past.
The three makeweight teams emphasised that the gap between the worst of the nine Test sides and the best of the rest was enormous. The one great shock of the World Cup occurred in the final day of preliminary competition when Bangladesh, already eliminated, beat Pakistan, already qualified, in an extraordinary match at Northampton. Legal English bookmakers had rated Pakistan 33 to 1 on to win. Illegal Indian ones had apparently refused to take any bets on Pakistans preliminary matches because of the teams association with general hocus-pocus. Inevitably, this result led to rumours that it was fixed, because there was nothing at all in the run-up to suggest it was even feasible. However, no evidence was adduced to oppose the view that Pakistan, under-motivated, had simply had a bad day. Bangladesh certainly had a confusing one. The previous evening their coach, Gordon Greenidge, had been given the sack, after flirting with it several times before. He was at the game but slipped away at lunchtime, leaving the team in the care of officials.
Bangladesh also beat Scotland, and so finished a very respectable fifth in the Group B table. But this tournament did not advance the cause of the associate members. Kenya never looked like repeating their great win over West Indies in 1996, and were outplayed every time. Scotland were heavily dependent on the Yorkshire all-rounder Gavin Hamilton, who was selected a couple of months later for Englands winter tour. Once again, this suggested that the real chasm was between professional and non-professional cricket.
After these six teams had gone, a new incipient table was formed for the Super Six, incorporating the relevant results from the first phase. Zimbabwe almost had enough momentum to be carried into the semi-finals. They were saved by rain against New Zealand, who finally managed to secure some justice by beating India and squeezing Zimbabwe out on youll never guess net run-rate. Their opening batsman, Neil Johnson, was one of the successes of the tournament, and matched the Australians stroke-for-stroke in the Super Six game at Lords when Zimbabwe went down to defeat with great honour. They also deserve some kind of best-turned-out award: their flame-coloured uniform was the most handsome of the 12.
India (who were dressed bizarrely, wearing a motif that looked like the fins of some great fish) were always struggling to progress further because the results they carried through were both defeats. Though they won the private battle against Pakistan, they never had much chance of reaching the semi-finals. In a session of blazing hitting at Taunton, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly had proved that mornings were not necessarily the sole preserve of the bowlers. Dravid, until recently considered too slow for one-day cricket, was the leading scorer of the tournament, with 461. But India were disrupted early on when their star, Sachin Tendulkar, had to miss a game because of the death of his father. And they also suffered because their back-up bowling was weak.
So Zimbabwe and India went out, leaving the semi-finals to what people were beginning to regard as The Big Three plus New Zealand, who had quietly been doing just enough to keep in the contest, accompanied by a rumble from supporters back home against critics who said the team was boring. In fact, New Zealand won only one game of consequence, against Australia at Cardiff. Their other wins were against the makeweights and India, who had already been eliminated. They played shrewd cricket, and had bowling well suited to the conditions: Geoff Allott, with 20, shared with Shane Warne the title of leading wicket-taker.
Once they came up against a class team in prime form, however, they were exposed. Pakistan had lost three successive matches, but had judged their defeats so well that they still qualified at the top of the Super Six. And in the first semi-final they were devastating. This match turned traditional one-day theory on its head: it was decided by the unbridled pace of Shoaib Akhtar. Although he gave runs away, he regularly sent the Speedster over 90 mph and the opposing dressing-room into turmoil. Their batsmen, led by Saeed Anwar, had no trouble. Then there really were three.
Something had to give at Edgbaston. But it was hard to imagine who or what. South Africas coach, Bob Woolmer, had been forced to abandon his plans to give his captain, Hansie Cronje, instructions via an earpiece. But essentially his team stuck to their methods: athletic fielding, fierce if spin-free bowling, and all-round batting efficiency. Indeed, the most feared batsman of all had been marching in at No. 8 or 9. Klusener, one of the most successful bowlers in the Cup, had turned tail-end hitting into something close to an exact science.
This concluded a final so one-sided that it descended from anticlimax into bathos. A match that had started at 11.15, half an hour late, was all over by 4.35 because Pakistan, the most exciting side in the tournament, had gone to pieces when it mattered most. The first World Cup final, at Lords 24 years earlier almost to the day, had lasted nearly ten hours. This one was over shortly after it started. The nature of one-day cricket is such that two evenly matched teams can easily produce a lop-sided match, simply because of the breaks of the game. It was, however, true to the uniquely perverse nature of Pakistani cricket that it should happen to them on such an occasion. Thus the best Test team in the world became the world one-day champions, uniting the two forms of cricket into one undisputed title for the first time since West Indies lost their invincibility in the last Lords final 16 years before. Hindsight made it seem like manifest destiny. It was obvious all along, wasnt it? But it was nothing of the kind.
When Australia had gone to Old Trafford three Sundays earlier for their final group match, they were in severe danger of the earliest possible exit; two Sundays after that, during the last Super Six match, Australian journalists and officials had been making calls to check on airline seat availability, which would have been firmed up had Herschelle Gibbs not celebrated too soon and literally thrown away a catch offered by Steve Waugh.
In the semi-final four days later, as Damien Fleming prepared to bowl to Lance Klusener the player of the tournament with South Africa needing one to win, Australia were effectively goners. But that game, arguably the greatest in the history of one-day cricket, produced a final twist that no one could have foreseen or invented. Klusener and Allan Donald had a horrendous running mix-up, the match was tied, and Australia went through on net run-rate, of which, unfortunately, more later.
Australias improbable lurch into the final was in complete contrast to their opponents confident strut. The Pakistanis lost three successive games which did not matter, but returned to form in time to earn their place at Lords by blowing Zimbabwe and New Zealand away by huge margins. But it has been noticed before that the way to win World Cups and not just in cricket is to fiddle quietly through the early matches and peak at the end. This is a lesson South Africa, who blazed their way through the early stages of all three World Cups in the 1990s without ever reaching the final, urgently need to learn. It is, however, rather difficult to convert this observation into a strategy. Steve Waughs diamond-hardness, and the bowling gifts of Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, seem in retrospect like the determining factors of the 1999 World Cup. But it could so easily have been very, very different.
The overall quality of the Australian team meant that no one not even an Englishman could begrudge their right to the trophy. But Pakistan and South Africa would have been worthy winners too. The class of these three teams (one might add Indias batting as well) gave the tournament enough lustre to make the whole thing seem like a triumph. Five months later, the rugby World Cup, also held in Britain, was much nearer a flop.
Yet the success came against a background of travail almost as great as Australias. Englands main objective in staging the World Cup was to reinvigorate the nations love of the game, which had been flagging after so many years of failure by the national team. For the organisers, the worst-case scenario was that England would go out quickly.
By the time they had completed no-nonsense wins over Sri Lanka, Kenya and Zimbabwe, that fear had receded to vanishing point. Some newspapers claimed that England were already through to the Super Six stage. For them to fail, Zimbabwe had to beat South Africa, which in advance seemed improbable bordering on impossible, and then England had to lose to India very badly. It all happened. Only 16 days into the tournament, with a further 21 to go, England were gone. It was an outcome wholly in keeping with many of the farcical organisational aspects of the whole competition. The hosts were reduced to just that: handing round the cucumber sandwiches at their own tea party.
The fact that the tournament maintained public interest, even in England, in spite of this disaster, represented its greatest achievement. The fact that it got into such a pickle in the first place was its biggest failure. In previous World Cups, this situation could not have arisen. The system used in Australasia in 1992, when all played all in a round robin with the top four going into the semi-finals, was widely admired and enjoyed. But this became impossible once it was decided to admit the top three non-Test countries, making 12 teams in all. In 1996, a ludicrous format was employed whereby everyone meandered around the subcontinent for three weeks simply to reduce nine serious contenders to eight. Then the competition proper, in effect, was staged as a straight knockout over a week.
For 1999, Terry Blake, the ECB marketing director, introduced a novel method. 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.
It took a while for people to cotton on. Then a perception grew that this was all rather elegant. Finally, the flaws became obvious. Notionally, ties on points were to be resolved by the result between the teams involved. Unfortunately, there were three-way ties in both qualifying groups; and New Zealand and Zimbabwe, fourth and fifth in the Super Six, had shared the one washed-out game of the entire tournament. The next determinant was net run-rate, familiar for many years from one-day crickets triangulars and quadrangulars, but little understood, and impossible for the casual spectator to work out.
This vile technicality decided the whole tournament, since the tied semi-final was resolved by the teams positions in the Super Six, and net run-rate had put Australia ahead of South Africa. It would certainly make sense for future tournaments to use a more transparent tie-breaker: perhaps bonus points could be awarded according to the margin of victory. It might not sound ideal, but would be just as fair and much easier to follow.
The whole Super Six system had other problems, too. Zimbabwe began the second stage of the tournament top of the heap because they had beaten the teams that went through with them, but lost to two that got knocked out. It was hard to see the justice of this. The complexities turned one of the most enticing-looking games of the competition Australia v West Indies into a farce as both teams tried to manipulate the regulations to their advantage.
Net run-rate was responsible for the failure of both England and West Indies to reach the last six. Bad luck? To an extent. But if West Indies had won more quickly against Bangladesh they would have qualified. And it is hard to see why England, with their army of officials, and who did after all make the rules as hosts, were so slow to realise the dangers.
When their batting crumpled so forlornly against India at Edgbaston, allegedly their lucky ground, it seemed like the blackest day of all for English cricket. It was hard to see how the tournament could survive for three weeks as a major spectacle without the passion and patriotism that the presence of a home team provides. It did survive. The big idea was that the World Cup might instil a love of cricket into the hearts of English youngsters, a generation unengaged by the idea of supporting a team which has contrived, for instance, to lose the Ashes six times running. That has probably had to be postponed until the next World Cup in England: 2019 on present projections. But a lot of little ideas flourished instead.
England failures always seem like accidents waiting to happen. And, organisationally, the 1999 World Cup looked fated from the start. The ECB had turned against the idea of a sole sponsor and, as they announced long beforehand, wanted eight front-line corporate partners who would not have their name on the trophy but would commandeer all the prime advertising space. Unfortunately, they found only four, two of whom (NatWest and Vodafone) were already deeply committed as existing English cricket sponsors; another one (Pepsi) was interested only in striking a blow in the subcontinental cola wars; the fourth (Emirates Airlines) paid almost half in kind rather than cash, which represented not-always-convenient air tickets for the teams. When Outspan came on board as a subsidiary sponsor, a launch was arranged with the obligatory ephemeral celebrity, in this case a TV personality, Ms Anneka Rice, who let slip the fact that she thought cricket was as boring as fishing.
It was decided to start the tournament on May 14, desperately early in the English season. Not surprisingly, it began in drizzle, and with a quite pathetic opening ceremony. The Australian hired as tournament director, Michael Browning, specifically rejected the idea of one of those grandiloquent ceremonies that start Olympic Games, making old ladies gasp with admiration and hardened hacks groan. Instead, he went for the worst possible compromise, letting off a few cheap-looking fireworks and forcing several poor schoolgirls to stand around in the cold. The one simple, dignified, appropriate piece of ceremonial which should have been used, the 12 teams lining up in their blazers in front of the pavilion, was not. This was sad as well as stupid: there was no public moment when all the players involved were even seen to be part of the same event.
From then on, it was difficult to have any confidence at all in Mr Browning or his arrangements. Since these included a media bureaucracy notable for its dictatorial incompetence, many journalists were not going to give him the benefit of the doubt. (Local reporters with decades of experience were barred from press boxes by ignoramuses; it was rumoured, however, that a butcher from Chiswick was among those granted full accreditation.) The shortcomings were worsened by the slogan chosen. The World Cup, Browning and his staff insisted, was a Carnival of Cricket. It was a phrase that would come back to haunt them repeatedly. The trouble is that one mans carnival is another mans nightmare. It is difficult to find much accommodation between those who want to sit down and concentrate on the game, and those who want to shout, chant, cheer and sing. For English cricket, this is an intractable problem.
The old English custom of running on the field at the end of a match or sometimes earlier returned with gusto. Australia were spooked by this early on and demanded greater protection. No one in authority seemed clear where guidelines should be drawn. There was much mockery of the Trent Bridge authorities at the New Zealand India match for their undue strictness. Yet Indias previous match, at Old Trafford, had taken place amid fears of full-scale warfare: they were playing Pakistan at a time when the always-simmering conflict between the countries over Kashmir had boiled over into bloodshed. This match, heavily policed, passed off calmly. It was the next Old Trafford match the semi-final between Pakistan and New Zealand where a pitch invasion nearly led to disaster. Pakistani supporters were the most enthusiastic wearers of replica shirts; it was not helpful to the forces of order that their lime-green looked rather like stewards uniforms.
Given the briefness of the home teams involvement, it was the supporters of the other countries, and the Indians and Pakistanis in particular, who gave the World Cup its vibrancy. The bearded Pakistani cheerleader, Abdul Jalil, was by the end of the competition more recognisable than Steve Waugh. It began to be noticed that Asians in England were the one community who had absolutely not fallen out of love with cricket. And it began to be widely accepted that the Tebbit Test the idea, promulgated by the former Tory cabinet minister, that immigrants to Britain should switch their allegiance was inappropriate; their loyalties were an expression of their individuality, and a perfectly legitimate one.
The 21 grounds staging the 42 fixtures were slow to recognise the importance of the Asian audience; few, for instance, made any change to their catering arrangements. When Asian teams were not involved, different cultural priorities took over. The Australia v Scotland match smashed the record for bar takings at Worcester; it was easy to get a sandwich but the queue for beer stretched about halfway to Birmingham.
There was criticism of the decision to spread the games so widely, on grounds more accustomed to catering for a few dozen spectators. All the county headquarters staged at least one match, which meant debut one-day internationals for Hove and Northampton (both of which had opted not to take part in 1983), Canterbury and Cardiff (Tunbridge Wells and Swansea having been used last time) plus the new ground at Chester-le-Street. Three non-county grounds Edinburgh, Dublin and Amstelveen in Holland also joined the party. Clearly, many of these matches could have attracted bigger crowds on bigger grounds: Pakistan v Bangladesh at Northampton could have been sold at least three times over.
But English cricket has only six available stadia which can hold much more than 10,000 people. It would have been very tedious had they staged seven matches each, and would have done little for the wider cause of cricket. It is arguable that cricket would have made less money, since fewer people would have gone to their local fixtures. Nearly all the grounds coped extremely well with their big days: only Hove really seemed underequipped, and that merely proved what the clubs executive had been saying in favour of finding somewhere new. Floodlit cricket could have been tried but was unnecessary, since there were so few empty seats (except when the corporate hospitality types were finishing lunch) at any of the fixtures. In this regard, all the problems were those of success.
The greatest success, though, was the cricket. From the start, it took on a completely different flavour from the 1996 tournament. There was a huge meteorological risk attached to starting as early as May 14. It was an unnecessary risk too, because at 37 days the whole thing went on too long. In Britain, where there are no long distances to travel, it would have been perfectly possible, with just a little compression, to have cut it down to 30.
It was one of Britains greyer springs as well, and the warm-up games against the counties were very wet. But, miraculously, only one of the 42 matches in the actual tournament was left unfinished, only one other spilled over to the second day, and the dreaded Duckworth/Lewis system much talked about, little understood was never invoked. On top of net run-rate, that would have been too much to take. It was generally believed that the team batting second had an advantage because at 10.45 there was still early morning damp. In 27 of the games, the captain winning the toss inserted. In fact, the team batting first won 19 times and lost 21 times there was one tie and one no-result which proves nothing. Captains changed tack in June, when the sun came out: 24 of the insertions had occurred in the 30 group games.
The lacquered white ball was thought to be harder than the red one by batsmen who were hit by it. It often seemed to swing more, especially late in the innings. This was one reason for the astonishing number of wides, 979, called by umpires who were stern too stern, and often inconsistent about anything wide of off stump as well as leg. (One spread-betting firm estimated 240 to 260 wides in advance: "We have been caught out horribly," said a spokesman.) But it was hard to work out what was most responsible for the tone of the competition: the ball, the pitches or the atmospheric conditions.
What was certain was that the pattern established in the 1996 World Cup was turned upside down. The bowlers, reduced to mere helots by conditions in India and Pakistan, suddenly re-established themselves as equals of the batsmen, or even their masters. Little was heard or seen of pinch-hitters, and lashing the ball over the infield. Indeed, the end of the 15th over, when captains were allowed to place a more defensive field, often passed unnoticed. They had slips because their bowlers wanted them and could make use of them, and had no plans to move them anywhere.
Heroes became zeroes. Sanath Jayasuriya, the dominant figure of 1996, scored 82 in five matches. None of the Sri Lankans seemed capable of dealing with the changed situation and, after the South African quicks blew their batsmen away at Northampton, they never threatened to make the final six. The reigning champions were the least competitive of the nine Test-playing nations and Arjuna Ranatunga, their captain, paid with his job.
The other Test team who failed to qualify from Group A met the same response: Englands captain Alec Stewart was also sacked. His teams failure was altogether less explicable, since conditions were so much in their favour; indeed, that was the general idea. The bowlers, led by Darren Gough and Alan Mullally, exploited them well enough but, in the crucial matches against South Africa and India, the batsmen were abysmal. With hindsight, it was widely said that the dispute over payments which overshadowed the run-up to the tournament damaged the teams spirit. But actually the reasons were much more to do with lack of ability. England never resolved the all-rounder question which has bedevilled them since Ian Bothams retirement. Andrew Flintoff and Adam Hollioake failed to enhance their credentials as batsmen or bowlers. It became clear that any team short of a fifth quality bowler was going to struggle, and England had no credible No. 6 or 7 batsman available who fitted the bill.
Englands exit was so sudden that it took a while for people to realise that it also marked the final departure of their coach David Lloyd, who had announced earlier that he would be leaving after the World Cup. And, much to Lloyds distress, the grieving process in the dressing-room was interrupted by counties enquiring whether the result meant the immediate return of their star players.
West Indies were the other outright failures. Laras mighty efforts against Australia a few weeks earlier seemed very distant. They were a team of weary bowlers and under-achieving batsmen; their best player was the wicket-keeper, Ridley Jacobs, whose chief assets were competence and determination. It is impossible to imagine that he would have stood out in any West Indian side of the recent past.
The three makeweight teams emphasised that the gap between the worst of the nine Test sides and the best of the rest was enormous. The one great shock of the World Cup occurred in the final day of preliminary competition when Bangladesh, already eliminated, beat Pakistan, already qualified, in an extraordinary match at Northampton. Legal English bookmakers had rated Pakistan 33 to 1 on to win. Illegal Indian ones had apparently refused to take any bets on Pakistans preliminary matches because of the teams association with general hocus-pocus. Inevitably, this result led to rumours that it was fixed, because there was nothing at all in the run-up to suggest it was even feasible. However, no evidence was adduced to oppose the view that Pakistan, under-motivated, had simply had a bad day. Bangladesh certainly had a confusing one. The previous evening their coach, Gordon Greenidge, had been given the sack, after flirting with it several times before. He was at the game but slipped away at lunchtime, leaving the team in the care of officials.
Bangladesh also beat Scotland, and so finished a very respectable fifth in the Group B table. But this tournament did not advance the cause of the associate members. Kenya never looked like repeating their great win over West Indies in 1996, and were outplayed every time. Scotland were heavily dependent on the Yorkshire all-rounder Gavin Hamilton, who was selected a couple of months later for Englands winter tour. Once again, this suggested that the real chasm was between professional and non-professional cricket.
After these six teams had gone, a new incipient table was formed for the Super Six, incorporating the relevant results from the first phase. Zimbabwe almost had enough momentum to be carried into the semi-finals. They were saved by rain against New Zealand, who finally managed to secure some justice by beating India and squeezing Zimbabwe out on youll never guess net run-rate. Their opening batsman, Neil Johnson, was one of the successes of the tournament, and matched the Australians stroke-for-stroke in the Super Six game at Lords when Zimbabwe went down to defeat with great honour. They also deserve some kind of best-turned-out award: their flame-coloured uniform was the most handsome of the 12.
India (who were dressed bizarrely, wearing a motif that looked like the fins of some great fish) were always struggling to progress further because the results they carried through were both defeats. Though they won the private battle against Pakistan, they never had much chance of reaching the semi-finals. In a session of blazing hitting at Taunton, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly had proved that mornings were not necessarily the sole preserve of the bowlers. Dravid, until recently considered too slow for one-day cricket, was the leading scorer of the tournament, with 461. But India were disrupted early on when their star, Sachin Tendulkar, had to miss a game because of the death of his father. And they also suffered because their back-up bowling was weak.
So Zimbabwe and India went out, leaving the semi-finals to what people were beginning to regard as The Big Three plus New Zealand, who had quietly been doing just enough to keep in the contest, accompanied by a rumble from supporters back home against critics who said the team was boring. In fact, New Zealand won only one game of consequence, against Australia at Cardiff. Their other wins were against the makeweights and India, who had already been eliminated. They played shrewd cricket, and had bowling well suited to the conditions: Geoff Allott, with 20, shared with Shane Warne the title of leading wicket-taker.
Once they came up against a class team in prime form, however, they were exposed. Pakistan had lost three successive matches, but had judged their defeats so well that they still qualified at the top of the Super Six. And in the first semi-final they were devastating. This match turned traditional one-day theory on its head: it was decided by the unbridled pace of Shoaib Akhtar. Although he gave runs away, he regularly sent the Speedster over 90 mph and the opposing dressing-room into turmoil. Their batsmen, led by Saeed Anwar, had no trouble. Then there really were three.
Something had to give at Edgbaston. But it was hard to imagine who or what. South Africas coach, Bob Woolmer, had been forced to abandon his plans to give his captain, Hansie Cronje, instructions via an earpiece. But essentially his team stuck to their methods: athletic fielding, fierce if spin-free bowling, and all-round batting efficiency. Indeed, the most feared batsman of all had been marching in at No. 8 or 9. Klusener, one of the most successful bowlers in the Cup, had turned tail-end hitting into something close to an exact science.
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| ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 |
ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 in West Indies:
The 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup was the ninth edition of the tournament and took place in the West Indies from 13 March to 28 April 2007, using the sport's One Day International format. There were a total of 51 matches played, three fewer than at the 2003 World Cup (despite a field larger by two teams).
The 16 competing teams were initially divided into four groups, with the two best-performing teams from each group moving on to a "Super 8" format. From this, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and South Africa won through to the semi-finals, with Australia defeating Sri Lanka in the final to win their third consecutive World Cup. Australia's unbeaten record in the tournament increased their total to 29 consecutive World Cup matches without loss, a streak dating back to 23 May 1999, during the group stage of the 1999 World Cup.
