The semi-final was attended by two prime ministers; the final had two presidents in attendance © AFP

Here's the most definite 'learning' from this World Cup: lets keep the heads of government and state away from it. If the India v Paksitan semi-final featured two chatty prime ministers, the final is being witnessed by two heads of state, the presidents of India and Sri Lanka. With all due respect to the Excellencies, ask the two policemen who walked in to one of the old city's Irani cafes for tea and biscuits just after 10am. They had been on duty since 6am and would be working till the game finished and the crowds cleared - an 18-hour day. They were there because an area around the stadium was to be 'sanitised'. Read made inconvenient for the general public and the Wankhede has to be a presidential-size inconvenience.

So spectators were told to be in the stadium by 1.30 pm because the ground was going into lockdown after that. Marine Drive, an iconic stretch of curving road that the stadium is built on, will have no traffic for a while, except the presidential entourages. The cops in the Irani cafe sighed because, to use a cricketing cliche, this was not going to be “a normal match”. One of them said, “So much bandobast.” It's an old-fashioned, Raj-kind of Urdu word now found in pucca English dictionaries and it means organisation or arrangement.

The only way cops on bandobast duty outside the Wankhede will follow the match, one of them said, was to listen to the noise of the crowd. They will have no access to giant screens that will be set up in even the most crowded neighbourhoods and they have been forbidden from carrying mobile phones so their friends and family can't even text them the scores. All police communication is to be done in the old-fashioned way – via walkie talkie. Because of the presidents, of course.

In all this maybe there lies the next brownie-earning political ploy: to show your love for the common man, don't go to big games. Stand outside a prime ministerial residence or presidential palace wearing a team shirt and wave for a photo opp.

This World Cup final is actually being played on what the host city still calls a working day. There were people streaming outside the Marine Lines railway station, but walking away from the Wankhede Stadium as they were going to their jobs. Even that early, the spectators going to the stadium could be identified from 2 km away as they walked carrying nothing but their flags. There were people selling giant flags at traffic signals, or at spots where, in this north-south city, people had no option but to pass them. On the footbridge leading into the gate at the Wankhede, there stood a man who understood what 'sanitisation' and 'presidential lockdowns' really meant. He had a bucket at his feet, full of mineral water bottles and soft drinks. He knew that standing in queues waiting to get checked and frisked before entering the ground for the World Cup final, people would be tired and thirsty. Ambush marketing be damned, this was Mumbai. There's always a way to make a buck.

Security personnel stand guard outside the team hotel in Mohali © AFP

News flash: The Indian and Pakistani cricketers are not having bun-fights over breakfast. The world inside their world is normal. They are getting harassed for tickets though, with one Indian cricketer stating that the only tickets he could provide was bus tickets to Mohali. The world just outside Mohali actually is normal too. A short distance away from the stadium which will host the India v Pakistan semi-final, workers spend their mornings breaking bricks. It is a large pile but they should be done by Wednesday.

Yet, it is not normal, not merely because one bunch of guys in blue will play another bunch of guys in green. The cricketers have suddenly become the bit-part actors in the drama. The two states and their prime ministers have struck. The Indian invited and the Pakistani accepted which now leaves the local hosts worrying about more than whether their sofas and carpets are spruced up and smelling of roses. Hosting prime ministers is one thing, but where the devil can the 50-strong 'entourages' that will accompany each of them, be fitted in? Surely their Honourable-nesses could have watched the game on some giant LED television?

It is a very big match, in a very small stadium and security staff are now on something approaching perpetual alert. With all apologies to the headline-makers, this is not the "mother of all battles", but the grandmother of all headaches.

After Misbah-ul-Haq finished his media conference, 17 uniformed officers of the Punjab Police and no doubt extensions of all civic security teams, and bureaucrats in civvies, met in the same room around a U-shaped table. They spoke in Punjabi, the speech therefore lost on eavesdroppers typing a few feet away from them, but the words that did hang in the air concerned mostly worse-case scenarios: "code word", "bottle-throwing", "traffic", "sabotage", "stampede". An hour or so later, a black Labrador called Rosie came sniffing around for explosives.

And we believe that M S Dhoni and Shahid Afridi are under pressure.

A section of road around Motera stadium building was re-laid just a day before the India-Australia quarter-final © ESPNcricinfo Ltd

If the World Cup is to be a roll call of some of India's leading venues across the country, then the ones lurking at the bottom of the pile should be Delhi (for administrative inefficiency) and Ahmedabad for a startling shabbiness. Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla has been remodelled, but its governors have stayed the same. It is Ahmedabad which is a mystery.

When the 1987 World Cup came to Motera, with an India-Australia game, crowds walked in carrying picnic baskets of food and spent the day munching through a hamper of goodies, which beat the quality and quantity of everything on offer. Motera was still a village with a cricket ground plonked in it. Its surroundings have gone from being fields, farmlands and mud houses to concrete low-rise homes, shops and a south-north access road. Over the last two decades, the stadium has made additions to its stands and is now entirely covered. In the city that has one of India's few drive-in cinemas still working, a big cricket match is still treated like Friday night at the movies. Everybody wants to make the only show on the solitary day. Two days before the World Cup, the ticket stands outside the Motera are not marked "Sold Out" but "House Full".

The world around it and the sport it celebrates has changed radically, but on the inside, the Sardar Patel Stadium has stayed trapped in a time warp. Let it be known however that players facilities are immaculate: the dressing rooms are huge, there are a handy bunch of nets on one side of the ground and teams get feted and looked after like State guests. For the public though, it has all been allowed to go into what appears to be a state of decay: corridors are musty, toilets are dirty, their powerful smell hangs around the staircases along with paan stains. There are cobwebs and trails of dirt running on walls, this even through the newer parts of the stadium. Special 'boxes' in one section of the ground were ready for the big day with a decor that could only be called grunge.

All of that could be window dressing but a section of the road being tarred and laid out just a day before the World Cup quarter-final is not. A two-kilometre queue of traffic three hours before the toss on single lane access to the stadium is not. Nor is the sight of people milling about dangerously in front of traffic prone to sudden acceleration at the sign of a turning or a gate, watched by indifferent cops who had thought nothing of organising a safe pathway for pedestrians. This was the city's biggest ODI in the last 15 years, surely the men behind Motera could have done better. They receive the BCCI's largesse in crores of rupees every year to update facilities and they have had three years to slap the ground into shape. The crowd atmosphere at the Sardar Patel Stadium was excellent and players won't complain. But Motera's fitness as a specator-friendly venue remains sorely suspect.

The Vidarbha Cricket Association Stadium is a compact bowl of a stadium, built tightly around the field © Getty Images

There's something about Jamtha. It actually used to be a village just outside Nagpur but is now best known for its cricket stadium that can easily claim to be among the top three in India. When an outsider first arrives, Jamtha's inconvenient distance from the city itself suddenly shrinks into relative unimportance.

The 1996 World Cup first gave to India the Punjab CA Stadium in Mohali, where for the first time Indian crowds were not packed in behind high metal fences as if they were in a cage. Mohali was open, generous and kept out pitch invaders with a moat. In 2011, Nagpur has set the standard that other grounds must follow. It is a compact bowl of a stadium that is built tightly around the field - and its moat has barbed wire - reaching its 45,000 capacity as its stands climb high. Yet the hallmark of this stadium is not its architecture or even what it gives to the cricketers, but the fact that its spectators have both been thought of and also included in the stadium's lineage.

Ticketholders can travel free to the ground from the city, which is 20km away, with the Vidarbha Cricket Association putting out 150 buses for the India v South Africa World Cup game. Spectators are allowed to carry in cameras and binoculars, given free water and have space to walk around the grounds. As they walk towards their stands, they see a message on the walls in English and Hindi which asks them to be on their best behaviour. The stadium, the notice says, is the recognised centre by the BCCI/ ICC and spectators are asked to “retain this recognition, it is in your hands”, and the notice then goes on to explain what that all means.

It may read slightly headmasterly but given that it takes little to turn plain partisanship into offensive jingoism, why not?

The VCA built the stadium outside the city because its old ground in the heart of Nagpur could not accommodate the floodlights that could make it a high-income earning venue for top flight one-day internationals. Jamtha was built, an official said, at the total cost of Rs 100 crores. That is extremely economical when you consider the cost of some of India’s big-city stadiums, even after doubling the cost of cement, bricks, tiles and what not in the bigger cities. Rebuilding most of the Wankhede for the World Cup has cost the Mumbai Cricket Association Rs 250 crore. The renovation of New Delhi's Nehru Stadium for the Commonwealth Games has cost the taxpayers of India Rs 961 crores.

Now if the good people of Vidarbha can produce such a fine stadium at such a modest cost, then why has the province not produced more than a single international cricketer? BCCI president Shashank Manohar, who used to head the VCA until recently, said that was because the people of Nagpur and surrounding areas were, in his mind, “contented” folk.

“It is the way they are in any field of life; they are happy the way they are and in what they do. In cricket, that may be playing Ranji Trophy.” In the age of Twenty20, IPL contracts and surging small town ambition, that somehow cannot add up. There must be something about Jamtha. Maybe Vidarbha's next international cricketer will tell us what that is.

The 'Martyr's Platform' where ceremonial functions take place whenever a soldier's body is brought to Nagpur © ESPNcricinfo Ltd

Nagpur gets a lot of bad press particularly when cricket comes to town – the stadium's too far, transport is over-priced, there aren't enough hotels around for an event the size of the World Cup, the restaurants are average, the bars are minimum. Where do you go? What's there to see? (okay, sales pitch: this is exactly what happens because you don't read this).

Despite its Dominos and McDonalds, Nagpur just doesn't do globalisation very well. God bless its socks for that. It may be the geographical centre of India, 1190 kms south from the capital Delhi (the centre of the universe, of course) and is still a bit detached from the megalomania of the new, shining India. The outskirts of Nagpur now stretch towards its airport, all along the two-laned National Highway No. 7 where women in saris still ride a confident bicycle along it into town. For the outsider, the rural and the urban do not appear locked in mortal combat here, their edges kind of mingle.

The cricket stadium that will host India v South Africa, the hotel that is running a non-stop room service for players, umpires, officials and the airport that brings them to Nagpur and takes them away are found all along NH7, Nagpur's World Cup bloodline. There will be many who will be in Nagpur but still not in Nagpur during the World Cup.

Yet much happen in Nagpur off the main road, away from the visitor's gaze. A local newspaper here said the Indian team took an 'alternate' route on its way from airport to hotel, the cops say, due to the accidental stoning of the West Indian team bus in Dhaka. It may seem impossible to chart out an an alternate route from what is a 500m dead straight road from airport to hotel. Who knows the route India took, but there's a chance that it took them past a somewhat sad spot which, like much of Nagpur, is hidden.

Tucked away near the cargo area at the airport, there rests what is called a “Martyr's Platform”. It is a series of two ascending platforms, four lamp posts around them, an empty flag pole on one side and at the top, a raised block of granite, the height of an average adult's knee. The granite block is meant for coffins. It is where ceremonial functions take place whenever a soldier's body is brought to Nagpur.

The city has always been a British Raj cantonment town and now houses an Air Force Station (also off NH7) but the Platform is new. A short distance away from the airport is the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) Group Centre, an operational central command for India's main para-military force that must deal with insurgency, riots or any political turmoil. The CRPF goes where the local police cannot handle the trouble and the army cannot wage civil war against its citizens. It is a miserable, brutal, and unrewarding duty, without the glamour or acclaim attached to the army. In 2010, estimates say the CRPF lost 190 men. For many of them the Last Post may have played over this Platform, a walking distance from the team hotel, 10kms away from Jamtha Stadium.

Not all of Nagpur is about oranges. Or cricket.

It's not everyday an Ireland cricketer gets hounded for autographs © ESPNcricinfo Ltd

They didn't mean it. Really, the lovely staff at the ITC Royal Gardenia didn't mean to be mean. They were just going about their hospitality routines the way they are planned. When teams arrive there, they get a traditional welcome: garlands, flowers, the thunderous ghatam - a traditional south Indian percussion instrument made of a clay pot. When a team leaves, a live band (featuring a violin, saxophone and guitar) plays tunes as they walk through a guard of honour, with the staff holding up bats on either side of their red carpet. As England left Bangalore on Thursday, the band began to play ‘Moondance’. The song belongs to Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. Now he may be from Belfast, in Northern Ireland, but as Andrew Strauss' team walked past, in a shower of rose petals and bad memories, it was always going to be an Irish song.

The morning after what Van the Man would be happy to call ‘a marvellous night for a moondance’, the Irish bid England goodbye, not like the hotel staff had done, but by elbowing them off centre-stage. The players were being woken up by phone calls and messages, hauled out of swimming pools and bracing themselves for a barrage of predictable questions. But like Trent Johnston told his not-out partner John (“Mooners”) Mooney as they walked off the Chinnaswamy ground in riotous celebration, this was what they played for. Johnston said: “This is what we train for, this is what it is all about – to be in that moment.” He was referring to the victory over England, but at some point of the morning, as Ireland’s cricketers sat around tables, drinking beer and coffee, all its other consequences also came into play.

England gathered in small groups, ready to leave, with their gargantuan support staff. Ian Bell sat unnoticed over his brunch while monster-century man Kevin O'Brien wandered around wearing a freedom and an accessibility that can only belong to a player from a team finding its feet and happy to show off its new set of shoes. It wasn't merely about O'Brien's pink-streaked blond hair or the lack of self-consciousness with which he wore an unbranded T-shirt and marvellouslly patterned bermuda shorts with large grey, blue and fuschia flowers. It was about how the man of the morning shared himself with everyone, and the simplicity with which he told his story. Chasing 328 on Wednesday, Ireland, O'Brien said with a little poetry, “didn't want to die wondering.” After O’Brien was out, Johnson took a slow, measured, deep-breath of a walk onto the crease, all the time speaking to himself. “I was telling myself, what you need to do is not to try and hit a ball for six. Just try and get us over the line.”

Ireland did go over the line and must now find a way to maximise the distance it has made them cover. They do believe they are benevolently being watched over by someone on their side. Two days after their main sponsor RSA (Royal & Sun Alliance, an insurance company) had first signed the contract with Irish cricket, the Barings bank collapse led to economic meltdown in Britain and Ireland. But as the contract had been signed, it had held up. Now the sponsors must look at Wednesday's result and contemplate the next step. Just over 12 hours after the victory, there was a brainstorming session in the hotel coffee shop among the sponsors and senior management of the Irish Cricket Union. The board officials, the sponsors, the players mingled with each other, some sitting at a table and talking. Older men made phone calls and shook hands to publicise the case for younger ones. It was corporate vocabulary's most overused word, 'stakeholder', come to life in a way it may really have meant to be, before being seized by spin meisters.

The day after they beat England, Ireland didn't need spin meisters, because its cricketers had a story to tell and could do so without minders minding bloopers. The most team manager Barry Chambers did, in the name of vigilance, was to carry two T-shirts over his arm, in case there were any TV interviews to be done and the players shirts were found too inappropriate. O'Brien talked about the team's involvement in the Irish Cancer Society's 'shave & dye' campaign – the reason for his pink hair and the captain William Porterfield’s purple streaks – and said with pride that the cricketers had raised 2000 Euros for the charity last year. He didn't think of the size of the number, just at what cricket had managed to do in Ireland. Not one of Ireland's top four sports, its players far from high earners, cricket had somehow managed to reach out to an audience willing to donate to charity at their request.

Wednesday's match did more than manically shuffle Group B in which six out of seven teams will have to scrap for a place in the last eight. Cricket is now full of far too much spin, far too much 'imaging' and far too many Twittering millionaires who wouldn't colour their coiffure for fear of denting their “branding”. What cricket's la-di-dah community have just received at the hands of the Irish, even if for a short while, is a real shakedown.

The ticket fiasco was a major problem in the lead-up to the India-England game in Bangalore © AFP

The Chinnaswamy Stadium, on the day before the World Cup, looked exactly like what most Indian grounds look like 24 hours before a big game. Rush, bustle, loud volumes, greetings, anxiety. Except this time, there was an unusual sight. Former India cricketers in roles that usually never involve them after their careers end. They were not commentary assignments or coaching roles and it did not even concern the collection of complimentary tickets. Venkatesh Prasad was standing behind the closed glass doors of one of the boxes at ground level, addressing a meeting of the volunteers. Javagal Srinath was answering queries about television feed to the line of VIP boxes on the first floor. Anil Kumble was in his president's office answering phones as often as operators of emergency hotlines.

The Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA) is unusual compared to most others in India, not because some of India's most recent international retirees are at the apex of its administration. It is the association where cricketers, who belonged to the state's most elite, fought a full scale election, campaigning, dirty boots et al, and within months of being elected must deal with every hurdle involved in the staging of any important fixture in India. Ego clashes amongst 'stakeholders', ticket distribution wars, pressure from government bodies that supply water, electricity or security. The KSCA's cricketers have had to be hands on. Otherwise collapse would be inevitable. At the India - Australia practice match, vice-president Prasad was seen wandering around the stands asking spectators for the feedback about the services and what they needed. Kumble was ticking off a contractor about some wayward chairs in the media box. As the frenzy for the India v England match grew, secretary Srinath found himself dead centre of the tickets controversy.

On Saturday, he told of his own time in a similar queue. At ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat's press conference, Srinath stepped in to take questions about the tickets and said that in 1987, he had queued outside the Chinnaswamy Stadium's green walls. "I was about 15 metres from the box office and I stood there for five hours. I couldn't get a ticket and I had to go back. And I was a genuine cricket fan." That bald statement told many stories and Srinath, went on, "I'm seeing the same system that has been around in 1987 still happening. Is that the fair way?"

In the 1980s, queues always lasted hours. To pay bills, to buy railways tickets, for any public services. Since then, the sad teenager outside the Chinnaswamy has acquired high office inside it and much of the rest of India has also moved on. Its richest and most popular sport, though, has not. Srinath said, "For 7000 tickets, there are 70,000 people standing at the box office. How do we manage? Is this the fair way? To have a box office where the absolute cricket fan would not have a ticket by the end of the day?"

He then told his interrogators that he would welcome any suggestions to sort out the issue in the future. None were instantly offered. The next question was put to him by a journalist from a regional newspaper, who asked Srinath if he could speak in Kannada, Karnataka's official language. The question was pretty much the same - tickets and the lathi charge - but what threw the audience off was when Srinath used the one word understood by most of the Indians in the room. In the middle of his answer, he folded his hands and people heard him say, "Kshama," to the reporter. It is the one word that people in public office find it very hard to say, and India's international cricketers, the Boston Brahmins of their community, are rarely heard using. It means, "Sorry."

Sreesanth strikes a fearsome pose, exhorting India to "bleed blue" © Nike

There's been a bit of a worry in India over the last few weeks - that India is not really that into the World Cup. That there's no buzz in the air, there's no frisson on the streets. Compared to the news coming in from Bangladesh of crowds singing and dancing past midnight outside the stadium and lining the streets from Dhaka to Mirpur as the team buses go past, there certainly isn't.

But there is a certain surge around India too. Call it the World Cup media tsunami. To begin with, it's hard to miss the monster-sized posters of snarling cricketers - so far identified as Praveen Kumar, Virat Kohli, Sreesanth and someone who looks a cross between Zaheer Khan and Cheteshwar Pujara - ordering the public to "Bleed Blue".

A few weeks ago they were wearing shirts. With the event now upon us, they have all ripped their shirts off, and shown us what blue blood really looks like: a Nike logo on the right pectoral and the BCCI logo, closer to their hearts, on the left.

This should have stirred every basic nationalistic instinct left to be stirred and led to men tearing off their shirts en masse and women marvelling at the torsos (surely not CGI, no?). Folks walk around them, though, mostly like there's a good giggle coming on.

Then, there's the shock and awe (not) of Cup carpet-bombing by experts on television. Every channel has been in bitter competition with each other to set up at least half a dozen experts from all over the world. A rush of ghosted columns in newspapers (thus reducing column inches for any kind of news) is surrounded by players urging us all to buy colas, television sets, housing complexes, insurance policies, shoes, socks and fans. Not human fans, but the ones on ceilings.

Of course India's excited by the Cup. All sorts of people are watching. When the first match between India and Bangladesh began to a deafening reception in Mirpur, the reaction here was one that could best be described as muted but keen. You've heard that 'quiet confidence' stuff, no? Well, that's what it's like. Quiet when India's not playing but overall moving around with a superior kind of confidence.

In a New Delhi coffee shop on Saturday afternoon, a cleaner leant on his mop, in front of the TV screen at the time of the toss. When Virender Sehwag began to wade in, the number of bystanders deciding to stand by the windows outside, grew from two to ten in about thirty seconds. The most quietly confident group were sitting near the TV screen. Two men who had been there for longer than two hours. They hardly drank any coffee or talked much, some pieces of paper on their table, one of them looking into a laptop which had a data card stuck into its USB ear.

Just before the start of the match two more walked in, with cheerful greetings and sat at an opposite table. They were a disparate group, as if a well-dressed art impresario was hanging out with a car salesman and an old-money senior citizen was friends with the guy who ran a paan stall. The democracy of cricket, surely.

When the match began, the art impresario with the laptop looked more into his computer than at Sehwag shredding the bowling. When a customer - this Nosey One - walked over to the cashier behind him to make a payment, he pulled off the Quick-Step-Finger: the thing we do to switch computer screen to disguise chatting or surfing Facebook at work. By the time Nosey had made the payment, the art impresario was playing Solitaire. When Nosey walked out and tried to take photos of bystanders outside the coffee shop watching cricket through plate glass, the paan-stall owner popped up his head to see just what was happening.

The World Cup is here and a lot of Indians are excited about it. It's just that some of them don't want to make it too public.