Oh, when will this come around again? © Getty Images

This is the last piece I do here during the World Cup. I shan’t be writing something the day after the final. I’m off on holiday hours after the game ends. I timed this trip to perfection. It’s a terrible feeling (I’m sure many of you know it) the day after an event like this one ends. I’m glad I’m getting out.

The end of a World Cup leaves me with a strange feeling at the pit of my stomach, a sense of intense discomfort as I go about the routine business of the day. Actually, there is no routine business. That’s part of the discomfort. The cricket will have left a void in the rhythm of the day, the days, and I’ll keep reaching for the remote at seven o’ clock in the evening my time and then realising that, well, there is no game to switch on to. (I know this from experience. I’m sure you do too.)

The evenings will seem empty because of there is no match; the days will because there is no match to look forward to in the evening.

So I’m escaping. I’m off to a place (Thailand, in case you’re curious) where cricket isn’t quite a national sport. And I shall take with me the new novel by Ian McEwan and the new book of essays by Susan Sontag to read and JM Coetzee’s Disgrace – for my money, the best book that Coetzee has ever written – to re-read. Besides, the beer will be pleasant, cold and plentiful; and the sea will be nice.

But I’m not so sure that that will fill the World-Cup-shaped hole at the heart of my days. I shall leave you now, as the final approaches, with a short extract from my book, You Must Like Cricket?. The bit that follows talks about how, especially as we grow older, the game offers us a unique, otherworldly thrill. If you've enjoyed reading these pieces – and if you enjoy reading the extract – you could do worse than to buy the book. It’s available on the web (indeed at cricshop linked to this site) and, as my publishers keep saying, at all respectable bookstores.

***

“Life, in its everyday accumulation of miseries and disappointments, its chaos and its agony, is more than we can bear. We, those of us who love the game, continue to love the game even as we grow old because we come to see how cricket offers us a parallel universe to inhabit in our living rooms. The thrills from there seem otherworldly; the disappointments do not have a bearing on my job or family.

And I need only to switch on the remote to switch off from everything else.
There is another, calculating, self-serving reason to feed this middle-aged obsession with the game. It is similar to one of the reasons why some people want to have children: so that our kids, once they grow up and we grow old, can take care of us. I have no such ambition for my daughter. But I do see cricket performing a somewhat similar, if surrogate, function.
It’s like this. I imagine a situation (and the older I grow the less difficult it becomes to imagine it) in which my career is over; I have arthritis or some other illness which prevents me from travelling much or playing tennis or going swimming; my daughter has left home, my parents are dead, my wife no longer finds me an amusing or interesting companion; and my friends have all died or gone to live in other cities. What will I be left with then? What is it that I know will prevent me from going over the edge, a slobbering old man drooling into his bowl of soup or plate of boiled vegetables? I know for sure that should such an eventuality come to pass (and with life, you just never can tell — life does have a habit of coshing you over the head), cricket will be my most reliable ally.

I will be able to, at the flick of a switch and the turning of a knob, with the riffle of a newspaper or the click of a mouse, be able to invite into my life those familiar images, those thrills, that construct of cricket being life. There would be nothing else. It would be, like many of the ways in which old age is, a second childhood.

I can’t afford to, in spite of pragmatic compulsions, not nurture the friend who I think will help me preserve my sanity. It would be stupid of me, wouldn’t it? Even a cricket fan wouldn’t be that dumb.”

	Mahela's innings must rank as one of the most intellegent ones in the history of the World Cup © Getty Images

Have you ever played book cricket? I don’t know if young people play it these days but when I was growing up in Calcutta in the 1970s, it was all we used to play in school between classes. In case you don’t know the rules, this is how it goes. The game demands that you open a book at random and look at the page number of the left-hand side page that has fallen open. (Why the left-hand side page? I don’t know. Well, why not?) The last digit of the page number (‘4’ if it is 224, ‘2’ if it is 82 and so on) gives you the number of runs you score. You go on doing this (and adding to your total) until a page falls open in which the last digit is 0 (say, 60; or whatever). Then you’re out. You could play in teams of four or six or one against the other.

You could also, if you were on your own – as I frequently was at home – play it by yourself. I’d organize a fully-fledged game between two Test-playing nations and bat for both teams. Book cricket offers immense scope for cheating. If the page falls open at, say 40, just leave it there a second, look away, the pages will riffle and, in a second, would have turned to 44. Result: the batsman who ought to have been out would have added four to his score. In this devious and not entirely original manner, I managed to make my favourite batsmen score many more centuries than they ever did in their careers.

Now the point of this long-winded story is that not even the most ardent Mahela Jayawardene fans, were he to be as big a cheater at book cricket as I used to be, would have dared give him the kind of innings in his make-believe game as Jayawardene played yesterday. There was about it something of the boys’ own adventure story, of perfect timing (not just in the shots he played during the innings but also in the moment when the innings arrived), of drama, suspense, joy, seeking and finding and fulfillment.

It must be one of the cleverest, most intelligent innings in the history of the World Cup. There have been greater innings, like Tendulkar’s against Pakistan at Centurion four years ago. There have been innings with more swashbuckle and imperiousness, like Viv Richards’ 138 in the 1979 final. There have been grittier ones, like Steve Waugh’s 120 in the 1999. And there have been more brutal ones, like Matthew Hayden’s 66-ball hundred against South Africa in this tournament.

But for sheer ingenuity and cleverness, in the wind-up to it – as much through the tournament as during the innings itself – Mahela’s innings was peerless. He had scored 41 runs in four innings against India just before the World Cup. He failed against both India and South Africa in this championship. Then came 82 against the West Indies and 56 against England.

Yesterday, he had at one stage 6 from 30-odd balls. He had 22 from his first 50. And he ended with 115 not out from 109. It wasn’t so much that his strike-rate went above a hundred in the end. It was the manner in which it did, with the twirls and the steers and the immaculate way in which he threaded the field, the imperturbable, sublime intelligence of it all.

Sitting on our living-room sofas, we fans talk so much about how innings should be paced, about the value of batting right through and having wickets in hand for the final charge. Mahela’s innings should make us all shut the hell up and just watch: if this sort of thing is so rare at that level of sport, imagine how difficult it must be.

Given the way in which Mahela’s campaign – from before the World Cup and during it – has unfolded, yesterday’s big-game big innings was a fitting culmination.

Now why on earth did I say something as silly as that?

	Sri Lanka's game is charming, joy-filled and ebullient while the Australians believe in taking no prisoners © Getty Images

Preview. Sneak peak. Dress rehearsal. Call it what you will but tonight’s Australia-Sri Lanka game is, according to those who put their mouths where their money is, one of those things for the April 28 final. What makes it even better is that nothing really rides on it (nothing, that is, that can happen to upset the possibility of these two sides meeting each other again in the final).

For a cricket fan, it will be a terrific contest not just because these have been the two best teams in the tournament so far (yes, I’d put Sri Lanka ahead of New Zealand because of its consistency and the quality of the opposition it has played from the group stage). It’s a mouth-watering prospect because the teams are exact opposites of each other. Nothing makes for a better showdown.

Australia is ruthless; it believes in taking no prisoners. It is clinical in its approach, gritty when fighting back and remorseless in its decapitation of opponents. Having been the best cricket side in the world for some years now (notwithstanding the ICC ratings prior to the World Cup), it brooks no failure. It is the champion side. It came to the Caribbean with the intention of defending the title. It believes in its invincibility.

It is an epitome of many things: how merely talent, even a lot of it, isn't enough any more, and how it needs to be harnessed with discipline; how one's gifts can't be taken for granted; how far cricket has evolved; how competitive a game it is and how mentally tough you have to be to play the sport at this level.

The metaphors I think of when I think of Australia nearly always have to do with surgery or with war.

Sri Lanka is charming, joy-filled and ebullient. It is beguiling in its approach, seeming to as much enjoy having the upper hand in a game as coming from behind. Eleven years back, it won the World Cup. And, while always having been full of promise, it has never quite come close to the form and flourish of that dizzying 1996 tournament. Now, as this World Cup wears on, it seems to realize how precious and how important this campaign is: this time around, really, it can go the distance.

It is an epitome of many things: how form comes and goes but class, true class, always endures in the end; how cricket is still at its most entertaining when played in their way – with flair and flourish and a sense of fun and goodwill – and that those seemingly old-fashioned things can be adapted to the modern template of the game.

The metaphors I think of when I think of Sri Lanka nearly always have to do with the fine arts or joyousness.

They have different means but the end, for both sides, is the same: they want to win. It's absorbing to watch how they go about that so differently.

	Another one departs © Getty Images

One of the fascinating things about any team sport is the extent to which individual players within a team matter so much to the fan. They provide the rich subtext within the larger narrative of a game. Individual players become our heroes. And heroes provide fans with an extra intensity in the heart of a game they are already intense about.

Heroes offer the repeating, repeatable motifs we pursue in anything we are passionate about – the moment when the bass line kicks in, the instant when the drink has begun to take hold, the moment when we are riding the high, floating, weightless.

I’ve had many heroes in my 30-odd years of following cricket. Increasingly, they are younger, much younger, than I am. (Quite a realization, that, the first time one has it. Then one gets used to it; one knows that the sportsmen we’ll admire will be only younger than we are.)

There have been times when they have gone and something has gone out of me. The passion for the game after such occasions hasn’t quite dwindled; it’s just as though there is a hole in my affections where the player ought to have been.

It’s always been the case with any sport for me. I remember it happening with GR Viswanath in cricket, with John McEnroe in tennis, with Diego Maradona in football. Who has it happened to with you? Has it happened to you at all?

Heroes we find while following a game in our childhoods are the best. (Viswanath, McEnroe and Maradona were mine.) We feel most intensely about them. And if we find players we admire later, the ones we find in childhood or adolescence are the true heroes.

That’s because hero worship essentially belong to the experience of childhood. As we grow older and cynical, we treat with mistrust the notion of being so utterly in thrall to another human being. The late Alan Ross, poet, editor and writer, has the last word on this: ‘I believe that heroes are necessary to children and that as we grow up it becomes more difficult to establish them in the increasingly unresponsive soil of our individual mythology. Occasionally, the adult imagination is caught and sometimes it is held: but the image rarely takes root.’

	Australia seem to be functioning at the rarefied level other sides can merely hope to aspire to © Getty Images

Now that we are halfway into the second, compelling stage of the World Cup, it’s safe for me to come out and say (I’ve stopped predicting when it comes to cricket; it’s too much bother and I can do without giving friends another reason to laugh at me) which teams I’m hoping will reach the semi-finals: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Sri Lanka. Is that what you reckoned as well? Well, good, we agree about something at least. Here’s why I want them to go to the semis, why I am enjoying watching each of these teams in this World Cup. What are yours?

Australia: There is no team more dangerous than an Australian side that is out to prove something. Remember the last Ashes series? Remember the last tour of India? There is something so thoroughly professional about the team. Notwithstanding its defeats before the World Cup, it sometimes seems to be functioning at the rarefied level other sides can merely hope to aspire to. It exemplifies how the toughest side in the world ought to play the tough game. Australia has been indisputably greatest cricket side of this century. Many of the members of this side are playing their last World Cup. It would be a pity to see them make a mess of their last grand campaign.

South Africa: It’s a team that has made an enviable virtue of playing to its strengths. It doesn’t have much variety in terms of bowling but what it has it makes best use of. I love their athleticism, their dour, steely rearguard actions. Watching them, you understand how far the game has evolved; just how fit you need to be to play the sport at this level.

New Zealand: Poor, perennial underachievers. It’s a very good team – that’s not new. It’s a very good team that’s delivering the goods, consistently – now that is new. They have the zeal, they have the experience and they have Shane Bond. There aren’t too many more exhilarating sights in the game than a genuinely fast bowler in full flight. (Except for… well, some other time.)

Sri Lanka: The sheer joy the team exudes on the field is heartwarming. It’s a team that is brilliant in every department but it most brilliant in the celebratory manner of its play. Cricket isn’t all about having joy and fun and seasons in the sun. It never really was. But who can blame a fan for adoring a team that makes him believe that it is?

	'India’s culture of hero worship, of some players being bigger than the team, of not being able to contemplate dropping certain players ought to have seemed alien to Chappell' © Getty Images

Things change, things remain the same, don’t they?

I don’t report on cricket for a living. So I have never been witness to how Chappell deals with the players; I have no idea (I gather all this from newspaper reports) whether he is brusque, inflexible or high-handed; and how often and to what extent he really got the sort of team he wanted.

I do know two things: that the ‘process’ Chappell kept talking about has become a much-derided word in India’s current lexicon; and that with Chappell gone, we shan’t be talking about the ‘process’ for a while.

Coaching India, like captaining India, is one of the toughest jobs in the modern game. Chappell, I think (and this is all surmise as I have said earlier), knew that it was. He perhaps hadn’t bargained for the sheer scale of it.

For him, it was a culture change – in more ways than one. Cricket has a tremendous allure in Australia, though there is hardly any hysteria surrounding it as there is in India. Chappell would have been aware of that.

The real culture change was different. From where he came, there was one policy: if you didn’t play well, you were out of the side. Australia has been ruthless about this. The selectors have time and again proved that they are unafraid to drop anyone who isn’t performing. Mark Taylor, Steve Waugh, Glenn McGrath, Matthew Hayden: they have all been shown that a place in the side needs to be deserved. They have all realized that. There are no holy cows in Australian cricket. There is also phenomenal bench strength. (One is connected to the other.) Perhaps that could be one of the reasons why it is the best cricket side of modern times.

India’s culture of hero worship, of some players being bigger than the team, of not being able to contemplate dropping certain players ought to have seemed alien to Chappell. (did it?) He was probably trying to extrapolate the culture he came from into the culture he came into. (Was he?) It simply didn’t work. (This we know for sure.)

A coach must take responsibility for failure. In a way, Chappell has done that by saying that he won’t seek to renew his contract. I only hope that others complicit in the nightmare that was World Cup 2007 will also own up.