World Cups I have seen

With the twelfth World Cup just a few days away, I have put together links to previous posts about World Cups, starting with the first three finals, all of which I attended:

1975 Australia v West Indies

1979 England v West Indies

1983 India v West Indies

Given the ticket-distribution issues I’ve read about, I’d note that my tickets for each of these games arrived several months in advance thanks to the Victorian innovation that was the stamped, addressed envelope.

In 2015 the World Cup came to New Zealand (shared with Australia) and cricket consumed the country in a way that I have not experienced before and don’t expect to again. It was all you heard people talking about in cafés and on buses. If only England were to be as cricket-focussed over the next couple of months. The final, I see, clashes with the free-to-air men’s final at Wimbledon.

I saw all four games played in Wellington. The New Zealand v England game was the most astonishing game of cricket that I have ever seen. England thought themselves reasonably placed at 104 for three, but were fewer than 20 overs from defeat, routed by Southee then pulverised by McCullum.  

England v Sri Lanka had centuries by Root and, sublimely, Sangakkara.

The quarter-final, New Zealand v West Indies, had something else that was extraordinary: 237 not out from Martin Guptill, in a World Cup knockout game at that.

And then there was South Africa v UAE. This will, I realise, be as unpopular as Theresa May, but those who lament the absence of “minnows” (perhaps the contemporary cricketing cliché that I dislike the most) should have paid good money, as I did, to see South Africa rattle up the most bored looking 341 you will ever see. De Villiers’ 99 was made in a manner of a great concert pianist refusing to use the black notes as the occasion was not deserving of his full talent. The UAE made no attempt whatsoever to chase the target.

In limiting the participants to ten, the ICC have recreated the format of the 1992 World Cup, the one held by many to be (apart from its odd rain rules) the best. The presence of Afghanistan and Bangladesh allows for the possibility (indeed, probability) of some giant-killing, and no game will be the foregone conclusion that made for such a tedious afternoon at the Cake Tin.

What’s more, the qualifying competition last year was splendid. The need to get their act together or be excluded from the World Cup seems to have galvanised the West Indies, and who wants to reward Zimbabwe with a guaranteed place at the top table?

I hope that readers going to World Cup games will enjoy it as much as we did here four years ago. In a perfect world there will be a variety of pitches so as to test all the cricketing skills, bat and ball will be perfectly balanced and England will display generosity in defeat when New Zealand chase down 370 at Lord’s on 14 July.