Dasher Dhoni's masterpiece delivers victory pizza

The winning six: An explosive cherry on an iron-fisted cake © Getty Images

Yesterday night was a bad time to go far a quiet seaside stroll along Marine Drive, Mumbai. I had been told this was one of the more peaceful and relaxing things to do in this ludicrously massive city. Thousands and thousands of people had obviously been given the same advice. Only there was not much strolling, and it was not very quiet.

In scenes reminiscent of the bedlam on the streets of Essex after local hero Peter Such received his first call-up to the England team in 1993 (perhaps even a little more exuberant), India celebrated as long and hard as MS Dhoni had hit the final ball of the World Cup. A tournament which began with jubilation and pride in Bangladesh at the mere fact of hosting the World Cup ended with similar scenes and emotions after India won it. Perhaps there would have been equally boisterous revelry had the home team lost, in celebration of the fact that cricket exists. Perhaps not.

I spent most of India’s innings sitting in the Wankhede stands amidst a crowd that was initially expectant and adulatory as Sachin Tendulkar began as if about to fulfil his unalterable destiny of scoring his 100th international hundred in front of his home-town worshippers to win a World Cup final. Some dextrously finessed twos through the infield, then two boundaries of eye-watering perfection, and the Mumbai Master was on the road to his crowning personal glory. Sadly for the crowd, traffic cop Lasith Malinga pulled him over and confiscated his licence. He pushed, edged, and walked. The crowd was left not merely agog, but severalgogs. A stunned hush clamped the Wankhede, as if the crowd at one of Jesus’ miracles had just seen their hero turn a sickly child into a mahogany bookcase, and mumble “Oops”, before scuttling off saying, “Same time next week?”

Admittedly, the stunned hush was declamped after approximately 0.75 seconds by the inevitable honk of gratingly, wilfully incongruous pop music. But the crowd visibly gulped as someone sang something about someone or something else not even tangentially related to the situation at hand. Not only had the Greatest Story Ever Told (Cricket edition) had its final chapter ripped out by a sub-editor and sent for a rewrite, but the billion-strong dream of an Indian trophy was seemingly about to be interrupted by an aggressively bleepy Sri Lankan alarm clock.

The rebuilding operation began. Gautam Gambhir, a calculating craftsman with a bat made of scalpels, and Virat Kohli, finding substance to whizz together with his style to make a critical-runs cocktail, slowly hauled the Indian ship back onto an even keel. When Kohli’s drink was unexpectedly glugged down by a thirsty Tillakaratne Dilshan caught-and-bowled, MS Dhoni grabbed the game by the throat and barked sternly into its face: “You are coming with me. No arguments. Now sit down, and do exactly what I tell you.”

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A World Cup final exam

Will India win the World Cup final? Will Sri Lanka win the World Cup final? Will cricket win the World Cup final? © AFP

Final Day. Mumbai is excited. India is excited. Sri Lanka is excited. Cricket is excited. My breakfast dosa was excited. “Who’s going to win, Andy? Don’t eat me yet, don’t let me die before you tell me who’s going to win. Go India.”

I imagine you, the readers, are excited. About the final, more so than reading this blog. There is only one thing to do in such excitable circumstances: calm yourselves down by sitting an exam.

Please sit in silence and answer the following questions, without conferring.

Question 1.

Who will win today’s final?

(a) India. They have two of the greatest, most destructive players in history opening the batting, and their top 7 can all score fast and significant runs. They have bowled with craft and discipline in their two knockout games, and fielded with an enthusiasm and athleticism that suggests that they were using stunt body doubles during the group stage. Quite sleepy stunt body doubles with the early signs of rheumatoid arthritis. They have coped comfortably with the pressure of both the quarter- and semi-finals, are peaking like a perfect meringue, and have a captain who seemingly would still exude calm if an asteroid was plummeting directly towards him with an estimated impact in T minus 30 seconds.

(b) Sri Lanka. Their spin attack is more potent than India’s, their top 3 is in scorebook-singeing form, they have waltzed into the final with two resounding clumpings, interrupted only by a minor micro-choke against New Zealand, and they will not take the field with 1.2 billion people tapping them on their shoulders and muttering “You’d better win this”.

(c) Cricket. At this stage, it simply does not matter. It is the game that counts. It is all about the taking part. As it was on Wednesday in Mohali.

(d) No-one. It will be a tie. The game will end with the two icons of their respective nation’s sport being chaired off the Wankhede pitch. By each other’s teams.

(e) The crowd. My prediction is that 83% of the Mumbai audience today will submit correct answers to the in-match trivia questions barked at them via the PA system and electronic scoreboard. If they have correctly responded that Graeme Fowler top-scored for England in their 1983 semi-final defeat to India at Old Trafford, they will all go home happy regardless of the result.

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Bad Pakistan triumph over Good Pakistan

Bad Pakistan again proved themselves among the greatest catch-droppers ever © AFP

The most-watched cricket match in the history of the known universe prompted probably the biggest single celebration of a victory in terms of the total number of people shouting “yippee” (or variants thereof) that sport has ever generated.

The cricket did not match up to the pre-match hype. This was inevitable. The only way it could have done so was if Virender Sehwag had scored a 25-ball century, Sachin Tendulkar had posted his 100th India 100 before being carried away into the skies in a flaming chariot, Kamran Akmal had taken a series of sensational one- and no-handed catches, Asad Shafiq had run into a phone-box, whizzed round at high speed and emerged as an at-his-peak Garfield Sobers in a superman outfit with a Pakistan passport in hand, hammered his team to the brink of victory, before Virat Kohli came steaming in like Dennis Lillee’s pet wildebeest and obliterated the Pakistan tail with a blood-curdling barrage of 100mph yorkers, bouncers and googlies, before with four needed off the last ball Saeed Ajmal danced down the wicket to Zaheer Khan and reverse-cover-drove him off one knee in the air towards a diving Ashish Nehra on the boundary who caught the ball in the tips of his fingers to prevent it going for 6 before a passing kestrel pecked it out of his hands and dropped it on the ground in front of Manmohan Singh and Yousuf Raza Gilani who then ceremonially tied their feet together and jointly kicked it over the boundary rope for the tying runs, before saying “No-one deserves to lose this match,” then holding hands and launching into a rousing rendition of ‘Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong’ while the Mohali crowd harmoniously crooned backing vocals and all cuddled effigies of Inzamam-ul-Haq.

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The most important event in the history of the planet?

Andy Zaltzman tearfully tells the world’s media about his devastating and mystifying failure to be invited to the Mohali semi-final as a diplomatic guest of the Indian or Pakistani governments © ESPNcricinfo

Well, this is all very exciting. History will ultimately be the judge of whether today’s game is indeed the most important event in the six-billion-year history of Planet Earth, but, going by the press coverage alone, it has to be a contender. Ravichandran Ashwin against Mohammad Hafeez – it’s like Napoleon versus the Duke of Wellington all over again.

The heavens opened spectacularly in Mohali last night, the fearsome opening pair of Thunder and Lightning ably supported by first-change bowler Torrential Rain, but thankfully The Weather has now been ushered well away from the PCA after the ICC rescinded its press accreditation due to alleged violation of contractual agreements.

Many have said that this game will be decided as much, or more, by which team can control their emotions than by cricketing skill. As we saw in Colombo yesterday, 30,000 decibel-shatteringly passionate supporters can turn into a 30,000-person nervous gulp. When Sri Lanka momentarily appeared to be tanking a guaranteed winning position, and the normally granite-stomached Sangakkara, after an innings of supreme cool and craft, inexplicably sent a precision bloop directly into the hands of third man, I had not seen so many anxious faces since Gordon Brown threatened to belly dance at the 2008 Labour Party conference.

Will the PCA crowd today prove to be a help or a hindrance to India? Will Dhoni’s ethereal aura of calm sustain in the frenzy of the most-watched cricket match of all time? How will Pakistan’s hitherto almost impregnable spin stranglehold react if India’s powerbatting starts tucking into it? Will India’s powerbatting even be able to tuck into the tournament’s best tweak team and fast bowler? Will India’s effectively-one-man pace attack be enough on a pitch that may offer little assistance? How will Pakistan’s batting fare in the face of a big total – they crumbled like freshly stewed rhubarb at a dessert-making contest in their one sizeable chase this World Cup, against New Zealand in Pallekelle? Whose limbs will Kamran Akmal be using today?

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Is there a game in Mohali on Wednesday?

For those of you unable to stream or download the audio of the World Cup Cricket podcast, below is a transcript of the scripted parts of the show. But it is supposed to be listened to, not read.

This week’s podcast features reviews of the quarter-finals and a look ahead to the semi-finals. And some contrived similes.

You can also subscribe to this podcast via iTunes.

The music in the podcast is by Kevin MacLeod

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The mother-in-law of all spankings

Seeing the ball like a football, but not controlling it that well © Getty Images

Thirty-six hours have passed since England were unceremoniously plonked in a box, wrapped in a ribbon and posted back home, first-class. After their dramatic roller-coaster ride through the group stage, many had thought that England were destined to go all the way to glory. Unfortunately, due to a contractual dispute over working conditions and image rights, Destiny walked out on a one-day strike in Colombo on Saturday.

Reality was called in as a temp to cover for Destiny, and England, after winning three and losing two of their group matches by the finest of margins, and tying the other one by no margin at all, were given the mother-in-law of all spankings. The roller-coaster derailed, flew off the tracks, and landed in a tree.

This had seemed to have all the makings of a close game. However, you can have all the makings of a succulent roast lamb for your Sunday lunch, but still end up with an undercooked doner kebab instead. Ultimately, their lack of boundary-clouters in both top- and middle-order proved costly. As did their inability to take the initiative against good-quality spin. As did injuries to, and loss of form by key players. As did their lack of bowling experience in the subcontinent – of the five bowlers in Colombo, Swann had played 10 ODIs in Asia before this World Cup, and the rest had mustered 7 between them.

All these factors proved costly, totting up to an enormous and ultimately unpayable bill. England had been living on credit throughout the group phase. Their cards were cancelled in Colombo.

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A fast-acting, unHeimlichManoeuvrable choke

AB de Villiers was run-out despite the best intentions of Faf du Plessis © Associated Press

At the end of another tumultuous quarter-final in Dhaka, the floodlights went out and fireworks blasted themselves across the Mirpur skies. The explosive din reached a crescendo, and then faded. Bangladesh’s role as World Cup co-hosts was at an end. Then, from the still-packed stands of the Shere Bangla, the supporters who had filled the stadium to watch South Africa and New Zealand struck up a chant: “Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Bangladesh”.

So it continued for a minute or more, an outpouring of communal pride that touched the soul of cricket. Then a man took hold of the stadium public address system and started reeling off a thank-you list of the tournament sponsors, and normality reasserted itself.

But for that minute, watching and listening on the press box roof from where I had seen the tournament begin in glorious enthusiasm five weeks ago, it was an entrancing moment, moving and hopeful, for Bangladesh as a nation and for cricket as a sport. If the 2007 World Cup skated across the Caribbean leaving barely a trace of its passing, this one will surely leave a deep and lasting imprint on this country at least.

This, of course, will do little to lighten the mood this morning in South Africa. Both sides fluctuated between brilliance and flawlessness in the field, and both bowling attacks applied constricting pressure throughout. The game was decided by slight but fatal errors by Graeme Smith and Jacques Kallis, dismissed by a wide one and a long hop respectively, which prompted a three-ball brain melt in which JP Duminy self-immolated and Faf du Plessis momentarily forgot one of the two things I imagine he was thinking to himself as he walked to the wicket:

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Why Kohli did not play a stupid shot

Yuvraj Singh landed the final blow that decisively ended the era of Australian dominance © Associated Press

The first real quarter-final was a fantastic match, taut, poundingly tense and closely fought throughout, played with an enchanting cocktail of high-level skill and intermittent outbursts of cricketing crackpottery, and ultimately won by some glorious batting by Yuvraj and Raina. Every over seemed to shift the likelihood of victory slightly one way or the other, before 27 runs from the 40th and 41st overs of India’s innings catapulted the game decisively into the blue corner.

Under the pressure of the match and tournament situation, of an Ahmedabad crowd who seemed to be attempting to break the world record for the largest recorded simultaneous nervous gulp, and of a nation unlikely to respond to defeat by patting them on the back and saying, “Don’t worry, it’s the taking part that counts,” the two left-hand batsmen mixed sound defence with clinical aggression against bowling of pulsating pace.

Yuvraj is one of those few fascinating cricketers who combine majesty with vulnerability. As a Test player, he has mostly disappointed, the average of 35 that you see in the record book at odds with the left-hand Wally Hammond that you see at the crease. That GraemeFowleresque, ShivSunderDasian figure of 35 is often used by atheists, when set alongside Graeme Smith’s equivalent of 49, as an aesthetic argument that proves the non-existence of god.

Even Yuvraj’s distinguished ODI career had taken a pronounced downturn over the preceding 18 months. This tournament, the visual splendour of his stroke play has been matched by its assurance and determination. 57 not outs rarely glow like beacons on scorecards, but in a match that was not merely spell-binding, but presented witchcraft’s top 20 recipes boxed up in a commemorative gold-plated folder, and that was played in the tightest margins between defeat and victory with big players on both sides exerting significant impacts on the drama, Yuvraj decisively broke the Australians.

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A Ming vase in a tumble-dryer down a bobsled run

“No one told me we weren’t in the IPL anymore” © Getty Images

The long-awaited quarter-final stage began with the kind of grotesque mismatch that was supposed to have been confined to the group phase. The Shere Bangla began this tournament being adorned by a trademark 175-run Sehwag powerblast. Since then, this apparent batting paradise has been scarred with three batting performances of stratospheric incompetence. Bangladesh’s 58 and 78 were joined in the 2011 World Cup Roll Call of Rubbish, in the Catalogue Of Crud, and in the Inventory Of Inept by a West Indian 112, a performance so poor it needed a whip-round in the ICC office just to be able to be able to afford a room for the night and a bowl of soup.

This was an excellent display by Afridi’s increasingly confident-looking Pakistan team. If you exclude New Zealand’s Pallekelle powerblast, off which Pakistan conceded 113 runs in 33 balls of unprecedented mayhem (two words that, contrary to popular belief, are not officially in the PCB’s corporate mission statement), Pakistan’s bowlers now average 19 in this tournament, with an economy rate of 3.6.

Battle-hardened by the rather tougher tests against the more creditable batting opposition provided by, for example, Canada and Kenya, the Pakistan attack was too much for the Caribbean team, who batted with all the steel of a spoonless grapefruit. Reports that the West Indies players were seen after the game throwing stones at their own bus remain unconfirmed.

In their two games in Chennai, West Indies at least looked a reasonable team who did not know how to win. They played some good cricket, only to undermine themselves with decisive bursts of ineptitude later in the games. Yesterday they got their ineptitude in early, hard and often. Having looked dangerously fragile in their games with England and India, against Pakistan they shattered like a Ming vase in a tumble dryer going down a bobsled run.

The most rational explanation is that Sammy and his men were racked by guilt at having spoilt Bangladesh’s World Cup on two counts – by skittling the Tigers for 58, then by tanking a winning position against England. They knew that the sellout crowd had bought their tickets in the hope of seeing two things: (a) Bangladesh play at the Shere Bangla; and (b) a team in green winning. West Indies duly, as an admirable exercise in bridge-building, duly did their best possible impersonation of Part A, and generously facilitated Part B.

Pakistan has produced great opening bowlers – Fazal Mahmood, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis ‒ but if someone had asked you a year ago which of their players was most likely to take 2 for 13 in eight overs with the new ball in a World Cup quarter-final, few would have guessed Mohammad Hafeez. Even Mohammad Hafeez would not have guessed Mohammad Hafeez. If he had, people would have told him to go and have a cup of tea and a sit down until he was feeling better.

Hafeez has had an excellent tournament as a bowler (in the last five games he has taken 5 for 100 in 35 overs), but West Indies have written a new chapter in The Art Of How To Play Spin. Unfortunately, that chapter is entitled: “How Not To Play Spin”.

In this World Cup, in games between Test teams, opposition spinners have taken 28 West Indian wickets at 16.2, with an economy rate of 3.60. Pakistan’s slowies took 8 for 64 yesterday; in Chennai, India’s tweakers took 6 for 134 and England’s spinsters 7 for 84; in Delhi, South Africa’s three-prong lack-of-pace attack took 6 for 138. Scoring 34 runs without losing a wicket to Bangladesh’s spinmen in their now-slightly-surprising successful chase of 59 is starting to appear a remarkable achievement in hindsight.

West Indies have lost more wickets to spin in these matches between Test nations, at a lower average, whilst scoring more slowly, than any other team. (The table does not make particularly promising reading for England ahead of their Colombo quarter-final on Saturday, nor for Jason Krejza before today’s India-Australia showdown.)

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Being there for Rampaul's 52nd

Sulieman Benn and Darren Sammy look like menacing fast bowlers, but aren't © Getty Images

Wandering through the streets of Mirpur on the way to the Shere Bangla, it was impossible not to sense that there was not quite as much excitement in the air as there might have been. Of course, had tomorrow’s game been Pakistan v Bangladesh instead of Pakistan v West Indies, as it so nearly was, the excitement levels would have been visible from the moon. It may well have been audible on the moon.

When Sarwan and Russell were at the crease last Thursday, the West Indies had been cruising to victory with calmness and panache, and Bangladesh was poised to party again. However, whenever West Indies are cruising to victory these days, they do so with the ghost parrot of preceding collapses chuntering loudly to itself on their shoulders (“you’ll probably lose, you’ll probably lose,” it chirps, whilst pecking away at some seed and commenting about how good Desmond Haynes was). Dhaka was duly deflated, and Bangladesh were grotesquely outclassed by South Africa.

I well remember my nation’s reaction in 1999 when, as hosts, England were knocked out of the World Cup at the earliest available juncture - it was a mixture of disgruntled chuntering from cricket fans and comments of “what World Cup?” from the public at large. Overall, analysts categorised it as a “mild huff”. In Bangladesh, however, there is a genuine sadness not that the West Indies had catapulted a winning position into a canal, but that the Tigers’ batting had come up shorter than Mushfiqur Rahim himself. Most would have accepted two wins against the Associate team plus a victory over England before the tournament began, even with a failure to reach the knock-out stage. But to have twice batted like a wedding cake under a steamroller has left a palpable sense of disappointed regret.

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Chawla to dress in dog costume

Yuvraj Singh channels his inner, er, walrus © Associated Press

[For immediate international release]

By Our Special Correspondent, Chennai

India’s World Cup campaign received a timely pre-quarter final boost yesterday with the news that the team is prepared to make legspinner Piyush Chawla dress up in a dog costume to assist their chances in the quarter-final with Australia.

Dhoni’s men noticeably perked up in the field at the Chepauk in their successful defence of 268 against West Indies when a small dog sprinted onto the outfield like a quadruped Jonty Rhodes, and, roared on by a crowd excited at the rare sight of something moving with speed and urgency across the outfield, ran rings around assorted groundstaff, policemen and Suresh Raina for several minutes. A somnolent atmosphere was enlivened as the Chennai audience enthusiastically saluted the heroic pooch’s Ned Kelly-style efforts to escape both justice and Munaf Patel.

The West Indies, having been accumulating comfortably at 154 for 2, but whose pre-match psychological preparation unluckily involved visualising that they were cats chasing a mouse, promptly collapsed in a cavalcade of batting ineptitude to 188 all out, as India found some penetration with the ball and zest in the field.

In the post-match press conference, Man-of-the-Match Yuvraj Singh, was asked by Andy Zaltzman, one of the international journalism world’s most fearless investigative reporters, whether India would consider hiring a dog for the Ahmedabad quarter-final, or making out-of-favour leggie Chawla don a doggie outfit and run around the outfield. Yuvraj, without a moment’s thought, replied: “Yes, if it works for us. Definitely.”

As the shockwaves reverberated around the cricketing world, other leading teams, unwilling as ever to be left behind in the race to perfect the latest of the technological innovations to shape the modern game, were rumoured to be considering making their fringe players dress up as animals. England were seen taking receipt of a pantomime-horse costume clearly sized to fit a Collingwood-Yardy front-back combination.

Sources close to the England team suggested that the Collingwood-Yardy nag will be used in the Colombo quarter-final for Ian Bell, the Sledgehammer Of Eternal Justice himself, to ride in to bat like Alexander The Great, intimidating Sri Lankan players and spectators alike.

Chawla himself refused to comment on the breaking news, but was later seen under the floodlights at the Chepauk practising barking and chasing some sticks.

[Ends]

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Cricket, history and Sachin Tendulkar

For those of you unable to stream or download the audio of the World Cup Cricket podcast, below is a transcript of the scripted parts of the show. But it is supposed to be listened to, not read.

This week’s podcast features thoughts on the quarter-final teams, and on why life without cricket is pointless.

You can also subscribe to this podcast via iTunes.

The music in the podcast is by Kevin MacLeod

Hello cricket fans, and welcome to issue 3 of Andy Zaltzman’s World Cup Cricket podcast. I am the legendary 1950s Ashes-winning tearaway England paceman Andy Zaltzman. Sorry, I think I had my drink spiked with Tysofrankambutamol, a steroid that makes you think you’re Frank Tyson.

I’m recording this on the morning of Sunday, March 20. I am just about to go to the India-West Indies game. And by the time you listen to this, I may very well have seen a piece of cricket history that will almost certainly never be repeated as long as the great game is played. I may well have had the privilege of witnessing India as a nation rise as one to salute a man achieving what no one had ever thought possible.

Yes ‒ I might have seen Sreesanth bowl ten steady overs, calmly, and without losing his rag.

Please, cricketing gods, let me be there to see that happen. It will be something to tell my grandchildren as they sit on my kneecaps in future years. I’ll be able to tell them: “I was there. Now stop trying to steal my hearing aid and don’t play football near my life-size marble statue of Ian Bell.”

Of course, it would also be nice to see Sachin Tendulkar score his 100th international hundred as well. But he’s only the first man to reach that milestone because England dropped Tim Curtis in the late 1980s before they’d given him a proper chance. And in a few years’ time, Michael Yardy will probably catch him up anyway.

In this week’s World Cup Cricket podcast, I will look ahead to the quarter-finals, commiserating with all the Canada fans who had booked flights and hotels for the knockout stages on for their team to cruelly let them down; I will probably sound as excited as a child on Christmas eve giddily feeling a present that clearly looks, and sounds, like the pet leopard he’s been asking his parents for years, as I selfishly hope Sachin scores that hundred today, when I’m going to be there. And not in Ahmedabad, when I may well be stuck on an aeroplane. And I will quietly reflect, in a thoroughly depressing week in which the world in general has scored a resounding 0 out of 10, on how much better cricket is than life. You can have cricket without life, still cricket. Life without cricket. Pointless.

However, amongst the things I will not be doing in this week’s podcasts are: reciting a new sonnet I’ve just written about the batting of New Zealand’s Jamie How; attempting to sell information to dodgy bookmakers about how often I will use the word “rambunctious” in my next blog; or revealing that if you take the radio commentary of Netherlands’ Ryan ten Doeschate hitting a century against Ireland on Friday and play it backwards, it contains coded information about imminent Armageddon and the end of life as we know it. More of that not coming later on.

So where else to start this week that with the news that MGM have bought the exclusive film rights to England spinster Michael Yardy’s forthcoming autobiography: Stumpslayer – The Vengeance Master Returns? Look out for Eddie Murphy as Kevin Pietersen, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie comeback as Luke Wright.

I’ll tell you where else: with the impending quarter-finals.

As I record, we know who’ll be in them, but not entirely who’ll be trying to smash whom out of which stadium. We do know that Bangladesh will not be taking part, after they were unluckily denied victory against South Africa due to the fact that South Africa scored 200 more runs than they did. Just think – if it had been Bangladesh who had scored 200 runs more than South Africa, they’d have been in quarters. Upon such slender threads do cricketing fates hang.

I hope Bangladesh as a team have learnt a valuable lesson over the last two weeks. And that lesson is: Don’t get bowled out for 58 and 78 at successive games at home in your national stadium with a place in the World Cup quarter-finals up for grabs. Tactically, it makes no sense at all.

The Tigers’ wildly exuberant fans will have been understandably de-exuberised. It was not a disastrous tournament for the co-hosts. They were OK against India, had two decent wins and one outstanding one, and had a couple of major national parties. Ultimately though, they proved to be short of what was required. About 11 batsmen short.

So, 30 days after we started, we are left with the eight quarter-finalists you would probably have predicted before the tournament began. And the eight that you would have predicted 30 years ago. If you’d been asked to. And if you had an innate hunch that South African politics was going to change a bit. A big bit.

Luckily, however, it was all much more exciting than that sounds, and more exciting than it could have been. And if you want to know how exciting it could have been, think back four years to the seven-week bonanza of bathos that was to 2007 World Cup. A tournament so grindingly tedious it made my television throw itself out of a window just to end the pain.

Here then is a quick rundown of the eight teams left to fight it out. And pray for a friendly coin to land on the ground either smiling at them with a head, or mooning at them with a tail, depending on how they’ve called. Two-thirds of all day-night games at the Premadasa in Colombo and the PCA in Mohali have been won by the side batting first.

So all those years and lifetimes of preparation, those biomechanical experts honing bowling actions to perfection, those computerised virtual bowling machines (the technology for which arguably could have waited until after humanity had found a cure for cancer), those dietary specialists, those video analysts and those motivational Richie Benaud impersonators will prove to be less important than the flick-velocity and thumb-power of an opposition captain as he sends a coin skywards.

SOUTH AFRICA

The best team in the tournament. By far. So far. Bit of a blooper against England. But they’ve had worse World Cup bloopers than that. Might lack a middle-order tonker. The tournament format leaves them vulnerable to a one-off blitz. But whatever Jacques Kallis has been putting in his hair, he’s been putting in his batting as well. He’s playing like he’s 23 again. Which is good, because when he was 23, he played like he was 47. Graeme Smith has a greater range of attacking bowling options than any other skipper, and he’s used them well.

Smith bats as if he’s trying to obliterate the very concept of beauty – in fact, Classical scholars have announced that they are reassessing whether Oedipus skewered his own eyes out due to his understandable guilt about the whole inadvertently killing his daddy and kerplonking his mummy business, or because he had just seen Graeme Smith play a cover-drive.

I’ll keep you posted. But he and his team are looking very strong. So far.

INDIA

The greatest danger in any long tournament is peaking too early. India have, very wisely, managed to avoid that pitfall. Impressively. Just when it looked like they were going to give that potent South African bowling attack the Mother Goose of all honkings, they lost nine for 29. Premature peak duly avoided. Tell you what though, speaking as an accredited cricket journalist, let me tell you: Sachin Tendulkar is a handy player. He’ll go far one day if he knuckles down and focuses on his cricket.

ENGLAND

England have proved that they can win any game of cricket, against any opposition, from any position. They have also proved that they can lose any game to anyone from anywhere as well. When you look at Andy Flower and Andrew Strauss, two admirable gentlemen of the game, so focused and calm and professional, the words, “lead a wildly unpredictable team through madcap, almost slapstick fluctuations in form, from clowns walking into plate glass windows to Nadia Comaneci nailing double somersaulting dismount for another perfect 10", well... they don't spring to mind immediately.

But six tight finishes in six games. They were 20 minutes of vaguely competent West Indian batting away from going out. They could now easily win the whole thing. Or lose in the quarter-final at the first available opportunity. Whatever, thanks for the ride, England. For the first time in a generation, you have lit up the World Cup. With something other than schoolboy incompetence.

AUSTRALIA

Last millennium, it took the rest of the world 975 years for someone to beat the Aussies in a World Cup match. This time round, it’s taken a mere 11. Further proof that Australian cricket is on the skids. Everyone will fear their potent if only sporadically devastating fast bowling attack.

As for the batting, opposition teams will look at their team sheet and say: “Gilchrist, Hayden and Ponting still retired? All of them? But Ponting’s still on the team sheet. Oh, he’s retired from major run-scoring. Great. We’ll take it.” Might still win it. Probably won’t.

PAKISTAN

Could have had the best attack in the tournament if only, if only... Umar Gul has been fast and magnificent. But in batting, they could do with (a) Afridi putting his sensible head on at least once this tournament; and (b) Miandad, Imran, Saeed Anwar and Inzamam back in the team. Having drunk a special youth-restoring potion. Actually, as they are now would do fine.

NEW ZEALAND

Eight-five runs in 22 balls. By New Zealand? Sod the supermoon, that is the sign of the apocalypse. Bruce Edgar, Trevor Franklin and Mark Richardson must be spinning in their still-empty graves. They have the thwackers to frighten anyone. But they played Australian pace and Sri Lankan spin with the confidence of a Chinese duck asked to pose for a photo wearing nothing but a thin pancake, covered in plum sauce, holding some cucumber and spring onions. Might win one, maybe even two matches in a row. Three is probably pushing it.

SRI LANKA

Hey, Muralitharan’s good isn’t he? The cricket world will miss the Sri Lankan sorcerer when he takes his 1300 international wickets with him into retirement. He might well bookend his career with another World Cup triumph. But he will be politely asking his middle-order batsmen to hastily read a book about how to hit a cricket ball.

They’ve depended on the magnificent Sangakkara too much. But they have home advantage and a big win in Mumbai under their belts, so, for me, second favourites.

WEST INDIES

Some signs of promise, but mostly unimpressive. Although Roach has been ace. They look likely to lose at any time. But, and it is quite a big but, if not a big enough but to get American rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot to switch his TV over to the cricket to see how much he likes it, they do have Gayle and Pollard. Who would beat anyone in a burst of powerful hypertonking. Could, but probably won’t.

All in all, it’s hugely exciting. I’ve noticed a declining optimism amongst the home supporters on my travels. Indians were bullish a month ago, but mostly seem resigned now. Almost no Sri Lankans seem to think their team can win it. And Bangladesh, well, poor Bangladesh fans. Excluding those who showed an inopportune interest in the parabolic properties of stones – wrong time, wrong place for experimental physics, gentlemen – so much hope, so much pride, so much love for the game. And so few batsmen. But I’ll take those memories of Dhaka on the opening day to the grave. I don’t mind which grave. If you want me to take them to grave near you, call my agent and we’ll sort it out.

That’s about it for this week’s podcast. A bit shorter than intended, because, well I’m a bit disorganised to be honest. I was born a week or so behind schedule in 1974, and you know it is, I’ve never quite caught up.

A couple of quick items of World Cup news.

Following the controversial reprieve of Mahela Jayawardene after what looked like a perfectly legitimate catch against New Zealand, the ICC have clarified that the TV umpire saw clear evidence on the TV pictures that a small worm had poked its head up from the Mumbai soil between Nathan McCullum’s fingers, and headbutted the ball into his hand. So, technically, it was rightly given not-out.

And they have also confirmed that Mahela was reprieved because, “he represents a throwback to a vanishing age of the art of classical batsmanship, and the umpires are perfectly within their rights to want to watch him play”.

The ICC have also announced two new sub-modes of dismissal. Following a couple of fortuitous stumpings by Prior and Dhoni in recent matches when they dropped the ball but due to lucky ricochets were still able to complete the dismissal, such wickets will henceforth be classified as “fumble-stumped”, and be marked in scorecards with the letters "fst".

And after Tharanga was run out backing up like a good boy doing what his coach has told him to do after Southee deflected a straight drive onto the stumps, the ICC has declared that such dismissals will be recorded as “fluked out”, and that any fielder caught celebrating an obviously unintentional dismissal will be docked 75% of their match fee.

That’s it. I’ll play you out with a bit of audio from England’s post-match press conference on Thursday. As you may know if you’ve seen the pictures with my blog or my ZaltzCricket twitter feed, my main travelling companion on this jaunt has been a little knitted WG Grace. He’s discussed celebrity with Dhoni, the art of batting with Dravid, and was told in no uncertain terms who had scored more hundreds than him when he met Geoffrey Boycott.

And at England’s presser on Thursday, I took out my cuddly WG, and asked the England captain a question. Bye bye. Thanks be to cricket. Amen

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Capitalism and John Logie Baird nearly cost England

After a long game of Eeny Meeny Miny Moe between victory and defeat, England finally settled on the former © Getty Images

England’s heroic efforts to reignite the 50-over game continued with another fluctuating, stomach-rumbling, rocket-propelled donkey ride of a match, replete with all the over-the-top melodrama and emotional mood swings of a teenage disco.

Once again, Strauss and his men yanked Victory from the jaws of Defeat. Having seemingly wrapped Victory in a burrito and fed it to Defeat. After Defeat had vomited Victory back up onto its plate, saying, “I’m not hungry.” Which followed them teasingly putting Victory on a plastic spoon and whizzing it in and out of Defeat’s open mouth like a parent trying to amuse a baby and trick it into eating a vegetable.

England could have won all six of their group matches. They could have lost all six. They could have tied all six. So three wins, one tie and two defeats is probably a fair return. A team with mostly admirable rather than thrilling cricketers has contrived to give the cricket world one surprisingly good game, followed by five varying classics that would have had Victorian cricket fans munching through their umbrella handles like cheap hot dogs.

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Ball-dunking and grudge-dredging

The ICC is contemplating changing the World Cup mascot from Stumpy to Ducky following the dew-soaked games © Getty Images

I arrived in Chennai this morning, ready to see England re-begin their World Cup campaign again, after a 24-hour journey from Colombo. You may well think that 24 hours is a long time to take over what most people manage in an 80-minute flight. And you would have a point. But I am an Englishman at the 2011 World Cup. I decided to take an unnecessarily convoluted route because I thought it would be more interesting – exactly as my nation’s cricket team has done through the group stage of the tournament. They could easily have won all five of their matches to date, but they chose to entertain the cricket-watching universe instead.

It should be another fascinating match against intermittently explosive opponents, and if they win, they will begin the knockout stages buoyed by the knowledge that only they and Australia remain unbeaten by top-eight ranked opponents in this tournament. England are amongst the best prepared outfits in sport – this must all be part of a scientifically-generated masterplan. All it will need is a few potent shots of espresso before matches to ensure they are battle-hardened rather than battle-weary. And some luck with the physics of rotating coins and gravity.

WORLD CUP LIES

- In order to negate the unfairness of the dew factor in day-night games, during all future matches in this tournament, the bowler will be forced to dip the ball in a bowl of water before each delivery. ICC big cheese Haroon Lorgat explained: “We want it to be the same for both sides, and, after our lawyers failed to persuade the dew to keep itself to itself, we were left with no choice but compulsory ball-dunking. It will be the fielding captain’s decision whether to use still or sparkling water."

- Andrew Strauss has sought to motivate his flagging players by urging them to use the Chennai showdown with West Indies “to avenge the wrongs England suffered at the Battle of Hastings in 1066”. The England skipper explained: “I know the West Indies are not, technically speaking, Normans, but if you don’t tell the boys that, I won’t either. It helps to have a historical grudge in top-level sport. For whatever reason, buried deep in the murky depths of history, we are usually the victims of grudge power. We just want a level playing field. Sadly, Germany and France keep avoiding us on the cricket field, so we have to be a bit creative.”

EXTRAS

- Shoaib Akhtar has finally, reluctantly, given up his heroic tussle with the unstoppable march of time and announced his impending retirement. Cricket will be a less interesting place without him, a throwback paceman devoted to maximum velocity, a seeming force of nature in an era of biomechanical precision. With almost 450 international wickets at an average of 25 in an age of batting dominance, he cannot be said to have failed. At his sporadic best, however, he occasionally equalled anything cricket has seen, and leaves the game having obliterated Ponting and both Waugh in one over of unmatchable brilliance, and having been clumped for 26 in another over of schoolboy ineptitude in Pallekele last week. Very few cricketers could have managed the first. Millions could have achieved the second. Perhaps only Shoaib could have done both.

- The highlight of my unnecessary but enjoyable train journey was, as we chugged through Kerala, seeing through the window a snippet of cricket in a woodland clearing in which a young teenage boy played the finest on-drive I have seen in this entire World Cup. He leant into the ball, he whipped his wrists, the ball sped away towards the hypothetical boundary as if from the bat of a laboratory-engineered hybrid of Peter May and Dilip Vengsarkar. However, a few miles further down the line, the next ball I saw involved a rather unathletic child attempting to bowl left-arm spin with an action so atrociously awkward that it made Paul Harris look like Bishen Bedi. Promising and worrying signs for the future of Indian cricket.

- My daughter, who likes to please, came up to me a couple of days ago, and said: “Daddy, I really love cricket.” I swelled with pride – “I may have my practical, organisational and logistical flaws as a parent,” I said to my vigorously nodding wife, “but clearly, I am doing the most important part well.” I turned back to my daughter. “That’s great, sweetie,” I replied, giving her a well-deserved cuddle. “And who is your favourite cricketer?” I asked. She pondered for a few seconds, perhaps weighing up the relative merits of Bradman, Sobers, Hobbs, Tendulkar, Kamran Akmal and Tavare. “Daddy, my favourite cricketer is Roger Federer.” Evidently, I still have some difficult parenting work ahead of me.

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Unexpected and instant fame for the number 29

Sachin Tendulkar tried to outrun the horrific performance from his team-mates, but failed © Getty Images

This increasingly compelling World Cup has continued to prove far more exciting than anyone could reasonably expect of a tournament that, by this time next week, will almost certainly have sent eight of the world’s top nine ranked teams into the quarter-finals, as was almost universally predicted before it had even begun, and taken more than month to do so. A recipe that looked deeply unappetising on paper has transpired to be surprisingly tasty, to a cricketing palate if not an English one, and the dessert course looks set to be a champion pavlova of a knockout stage. Cricket has been lucky. In Group B, at least.

I have seen only snippets of the last few games, as I have been on holiday with my young family on the southern coast of Sri Lanka. One of the benefits of a holiday on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, or indeed anywhere in Sri Lanka, is that all the hotels come fully equipped with staff who are able to provide accurate and well-informed information about and in-depth analysis of international cricket.

From score updates to well-reasoned arguments explaining why Sri Lanka’s middle order could prove to be their Achilles heel, from potted player biographies to tactical critiques of captaincy, the service is exemplary, and far, far superior to anything I have experienced in Europe. Rome may be a magical city in many respects, but in terms of hotel staff cricket knowledge, it is to Galle what Jimi Hendrix is to Shane Warne in terms of leg-spin bowling.

I managed to see only brief snippets of India’s alarm-bell-clanging defeat to South Africa. I saw Tendulkar place the entire city of Chennai on cricketing history red alert for his next match on March 20 by majesterialising to his 99th international century. “Looks like India are hitting form at the right time,” I thought to myself in a sage piece of internal punditry. I left the TV room to return to my hitherto vain attempts to persuade my children that flies are not necessarily lethal. India promptly collapsed like a prim Victorian lady at the unexpected sight of a gentleman’s unshirted chest. From 267 for 1, their last nine wickets evaporated for 29, equalling the World Cup record for Most Useless Final Eight Partnerships In An Innings, set earlier this tournament by Kenya when uselessly capitulating against New Zealand.

The worst last-nine-wickets figure for a Test nation in a World Cup before this tournament was 59 by England, as Joel Garner chunked them into cricket marmalade in the 1979 final. All this after Tendulkar, Sehwag and Gambhir had combined to reach the fifth-highest ever World Cup total for the loss of one wicket. It is fair to say that India did not make the most of their brilliant start, as if Neil Armstrong had turned to Buzz Alldrin and said, “Looks a bit chilly out there, let’s just head home.”

29 for 9 – the equal fourth worst nine-wicket collapse to end an innings in ODI history. Coincidentally, 29 is also the number of times during breakfast the following day that Sachin Tendulkar looked up from his cornflakes with an expression on his face that unmistakably read: “Are any of you guys going to attempt to (a) explain and (b) apologise for that?”

That India’s middle order should fail more convincingly than a learner driver ploughing into a crowded bus stop whilst flicking a v-sign at his instructor during his driving test is concerning enough. India’s bowling, which had always looked like their Achilles heel, began to look like an Achilles leg as the unfortunate Nehra was planked into the Nagpur stands by Peterson, and MS Dhoni began to think: “Maybe, with the benefit of two balls’ worth of hindsight, I should have let Harbhajan bowl this one after all.”

It is beginning to appear that India’s greatest problem is their insufficient number of bowlers whose names begin with H or Z. In their three matches against Test opposition in this World Cup so far, Harbhajan has conceded 5.24 per over, and Zaheer 4.90. Munaf, Sreesanth, Nehra, Chawla, Yuvraj and Pathan have been clonked for 597 in 90.4 overs, each at a run a ball or worse, collectively at 6.58 per over. It may not be impossible to win a World Cup with only two fully functioning bowlers. But it will not be easy.

(I have a two-year-old son who has an H-commencing first name to go with his Zaltzman surname. He does not currently hold an Indian passport, but I’m sure these things can be arranged, and he has a South-African-born grandfather, which I think means he is eligible to play for any country of his choosing. His two-year-old bowling action, however, is unlikely to pass ICC scrutiny. And he frequently oversteps. And they should probably let R Ashwin have a go first.)

Fortunately for India, they are not alone. Every team left in this tournament is nervously flexing its metaphorical lower leg, urgently seeking physiotherapy for its own niggling Achilles heel, checking the internet to find any versions of the ancient Greek myth in which Achilles turned out fine after all, and wishing its metaphorical mother had taken a little more care when dipping it in the river of cricketing invincibility.

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England share joy of winning with lesser teams

Bangladesh benefitted from England's desire to share the joys of cricketing triumph with nations who have seen too little of it © Getty Images

Apologies for the rather late posting of today’s blog. This has been due to a number of factors:

1. I am on holiday for a few days with the family, and have yet to discover a satisfactory method of turning writing about cricket into a fun game in which a two-year-old boy and four-year-old girl can happily participate. Let alone a wife.

2. I was trying to describe how I imagine the scenes on the streets of Bangladesh must have been last night, without (a) the use of a thesaurus, or (b) my computer melting; this proved impossible.

3. I have been busy working on the libretto for my forthcoming blues-funk opera about the career of Chris Tavare, Brigadier Block And The Deadbat Demons.

4. A minor medical emergency. About fifteen minutes after Mahmudullah clonked Bresnan to the cover boundary to provoke pandemonium across Bangladesh (and major twinges of regret amongst those who had been in the Chittagong Stadium but had left in disgust at around the time the 8th Bangladesh wicket fell), I felt an itching in my hands and feet. Shortly, my face reddened and pink blotches started appearing on my arms. Within another fifteen minutes, my head and upper torso were attempting and pulling off a fairly convincing impersonation of an embarrassed beetroot. Being a hypochondriac Englishman abroad, I naturally assumed it was almost certainly 100% fatal, and started mentally composing my own Wisden obituary (“a flamboyant and irrepressible strokeplayer who was denied international honours only by the misfortune of his own genetic makeup, selectorial prejudice against rubbish cricketers, and his inability to play flamboyant and/or irrepressible strokes”).

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Lists on which both Chakabva and Boon appear

Muttiah Muralitharan is arguably the finest spinner to come out of Kandy, no matter what North Korean leader Kim Jong il says © AFP

On the evidence of yesterday in Pallekele, Muttiah Muralitharan is quite popular in this part of the world. A jam-packed stadium paid noisy tribute to the great man as Regis Chakabva and Chris Mpofu became the newest names on Murali’s Batsmen-I-Have-Dismissed list. There are not many lists on which Regis Chakabva and David Boon both appear, but that is one of them (although I admit that I write this in ignorance of Chakabva’s airborne beer-guzzling capabilities, nor have I ever seen anyone repeatedly attempt to shove him over in an effort to join Boon in the upper echelons of the Least Topplable Sportsmen chart).

It is easy to understand Murali’s popularity. An even shorter list than the list of Lists Containing Boon and Chakabva would be the catalogue of people in the world who argue that Murali is not the finest spin bowler the Kandy area has produced. This features only crackpot North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who claims that honour for himself (and, as well as stating that he shot 38 under par in a round of golf, I like to think that Kim also lists 1,243 Test wickets at an average of 6.34 in the ‘Other Achievements’ section of his CV, with best figures of 11 for 3 against West Indies in 1985-86), a couple of gratuitously argumentative Australians who claim that Shane Warne was in fact born there, and hardcore fundamentalist fans of 1990s off-tweaking all-rounder Ruwan Kalpage.

And perhaps the shortest of all is the list of cricketers who have played an international in a stadium named after themselves. Perhaps ex-Worcestershire opener Gordon Lord used to play with an extra spring of pride in his step whenever he played against Middlesex at Lord’s, but he must have known he was kidding himself, and it is doubtful that he had 25,000 people cheering his every move.

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Twenty utterly crazy minutes

Jacob Orman and Ross Taylor decided everything must go, with everything being the Pakistan bowlers © Getty Images

The words “spectacular” and “New Zealand batting” have not always sat comfortably together in the same sentence. Yesterday, for twenty utterly crazy minutes, they were amorously smooching each other on the sofa at Pallekele, their clothes flying off in all directions whilst Barry White crooned in the background.

We must first pay tribute to the man who made it all possible – the Maharajah of Missed Chances, the Don Corleone of Dropped Catches, the Earl of Err, the Pharaoh of Fumble, Lance Corporal Granite Hands himself, Kamran Akmal. Shoaib Akhtar’s opening spell had been a microcosm of his career, a mixture of brilliance, wastefulness, and underachievement. He clean bowled Brendan McCullum with a perfect off cutter, beat a clutch of outside edges, touched 90mph, bowled three no-balls and conceded 14 from the resulting free hits, and needlessly hurled a ball so far over Kamran’s head for 4 byes that the beleaguered gloveman would have needed both a giraffe on a ladder and a functioning pair of hands to stop it. Neither of which, sadly, were at his disposal.

Afridi brought Shoaib back to bowl at Ross Taylor when he was not yet off the mark. Shoiab instantly found the edge. It flew just to Kamran’s right. It was perfection – shrewd captaincy and fine bowling had ensnared a dangerous opponent. And Kamran, a renowned lover of beauty, did not want to spoil the aesthetic of that perfection by moving half a step to his right and interrupting the majestic parabola of the edged ball. One chance missed. Oops. No matter – Taylor was looking like a wicket in waiting.

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Unravelling the mystery of Kamran Akmal's chirps

Kamran Akmal typically has plenty to say behind the stumps, but no one is quite sure what he is chirping about © Getty Images

Today’s blog consists of the first batch of responses to the Ask Andy questions that you, the reader, have submitted. I have endeavoured to answer them as honestly and truthfully as possible.

Hi Andy. Please can you find out what Kamran Akmal constantly chirps through the game? Could he just get a T-shirt printed?
Kicker of Elves, UK

I have made extensive enquiries through my network of sources throughout international cricket, and there is some disagreement over exactly what Kamran is chirping. Some believe it to be a dictation of the latest chapters of his epic autobiographical novel, The Wicketkeeper Who Came In From The Cold. Some literary critics have accused him of being “far too easily influenced by British spy writer John le Carré”, but Kamran finds it easier to write whilst wicket-keeping, then he goes home, watches the TV coverage of the day’s play, and transcribes the latest thrilling plot twists onto his typewriter.

Others are convinced it is his own translation of the works of 1970s rock group Supertramp, whose songs he believes contain coded words of advice and encouragement for spin bowlers which he is only too keen to relay. Former Pakistan Test player Mansoor Akhtar is alone in thinking that Kamran’s chirps, when played backwards, contain a savage assessment of the actions of the World Bank in failing to alleviate global poverty.

Personally, I believe his chirps to be just that – chirps. Kamran is attempting to summon a bird of prey, in the hope that it will fly behind the bowler’s arm at the moment of delivery, distracting the batsman and resulting in a wicket for his beloved Pakistan.

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With England, appearances are deceiving

The real James Anderson showed up against South Africa © Getty Images

What an odd team England are. They are comprehensively prepared, and admirably focused. They are honed with scientific exactness, and led with calm assurance by an irrefutably level-headed captain-and-coach combination. And they are wildly inconsistent. They are like a man who dresses like an accountant, talks like an accountant, lives in a comfortable suburban house, and sleeps in spreadsheet-print pyjamas. But who is actually the lead singer of a thrash metal band, with an unrivalled collection of exotic snakes.

I did not see much of yesterday’s match, as I was travelling from Colombo to the hills near Kandy, past innumerable impromptu cricket games (few of which, it must be sadly reported, were being played with ICC-regulation equipment, accurately measured creases, or properly qualified umpires). We left Colombo as Ian Bell was trudging back to the pavilion, and the cricket world was wondering whether Robin Peterson had been injected with a special serum made out of the DNA of Hedley Verity, Bishen Bedi and Derek Underwood. We stopped for lunch in time to find out that Jonathan Trott and Ravi Bopara’s steady recovery had evaporated in a nostalgia-tinged England collapse against leg spin. We departed post-lunch with Graeme Smith and Hashim Amla seemingly intent on securing a merciless 10-wicket drubbing, against an England team looking more stony-faced than an Easter Island statue.

So it was with considerable surprise and, from an English perspective, delight, that I discovered that England’s hitherto struggling bowling attack had turned the game on its head, with Stuart Broad and James Anderson, arguably England’s two most important players in this tournament, to the fore.

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Impromptu cricket matches and an elephant

Tigers fans were not particularly pleased by their sides capitulation for 58, but there were tactical reasons for the collapse © Getty Images

I arrived in Colombo yesterday to be greeted by (a) my wife and children; (b) more heat than a pasty-skinned Englishman is genetically designed to withstand; and (c) the confirmation that England had definitely lost to Ireland the day before. Just in case I had not heard the news, immigration officials, taxi drivers and hotel staff were only too willing to inform me that England had definitely lost to Ireland the day before. They conveyed the sad tidings with admirable enthusiasm.

Colombo is a very different place to London. At home, few advertising billboards feature Thilan Samaraweera. Yet. Nor are there multiple impromptu cricket matches taking place in any available space – I saw at least six on the journey in from the airport to the city, which is around 5.99 more than you will see on the average journey into London from Heathrow. Nor is it common in the capital of England to see an elephant in a temple by the side of the road casually munching his afternoon snack and watching the traffic whizz by. As first impressions of a country go, it was an impressive effort by the Tear Drop Island. (Although I acknowledge that, if you absolutely hate cricket and think elephants are a living skewer in the eye for Charles Darwin, you might not have been so impressed.

Aside from the deep feelings of name-jealousy that all British people feel here – is there a single Sri Lankan with a name as dull as Andy? or a single Brit will a moniker as spectacular as Asoka de Silva’s first-name masterpiece, Ellawalakankanamge ‒ an English cricket fan might feel a tweak of envy at the pre-eminence of the sport in this country. Today, I will see Sri Lanka take on Australia at the Premadasa. I have seen Bangladesh in Dhaka (on a better-behaved and rather chirpier day than yesterday), and India in Bangalore (veering between adulation, resignation, exultation and relief), so after tomorrow’s game I will be able to give you definitive verdicts on which country’s supporters, and stadium PA systems, are the noisiest.

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The finest innings of all time by a man with pink hair

Yardy: when he’s not being Superman, he’s Sobers © Getty Images

I admire a country that shows cricket highlights in airport departure lounges. It shows an appreciation that there is no part of modern life that cannot be improved by the showing of cricket highlights. However, why the authorities at Bangalore airport felt it necessary this morning to show highlights of yesterday’s England against Ireland clash remains a mystery. I would have thought that showing highlights of the recent Melbourne Test Match, or England’s 1987 World Cup semi-final win over India, or a film about Bodyline, would have been more appropriate.

For whatever reason, England v Ireland it was. Despite it being a rather mundane, predictable match. For the first 75 overs. Admittedly, the last 25 overs perked up a bit. Even so, there was not much to savour for the hardcore Michael Yardy fans in the airport, an audience that is too little catered for by the cricketing highlights industry. They can watch a few glimpses on the internet of Garfield Sobers, Yardy’s spiritual predecessor and cricketalike as a useful left-hand batsman and tidy purveyor of seam and spin, but it is not the same as watching the man himself.

I digress. It is a rare privilege to see a cricketer propel himself from relative anonymity into immortality in the annals of the game. Kevin O’Brien did so yesterday, in what was, without any question, the finest innings I have seen by someone with pink hair (and it possibly even surpassed Wally Hammond’s 240 at Lord’s in 1938, after the great English batsman fell asleep in a bowl of beetroot soup at dinner the night before the game – he was eternally thankful that his great innings was recorded only in black and white).

O’Brien strode to the wicket yesterday with an ODI average of 34, and a strike rate of 75. Against current Test nations, he averaged 22. In World Cups he averaged 23. His one previous ODI century was against Kenya three years ago. So it is fair to say that if a passing soothsayer had told you that he would reach 100 off 50 balls against an attack containing three of the world’s top 10-ranked Test bowlers, including moving from 5 to 90 in 35 of the more extraordinary deliveries in cricket history, you would have sat him down, mopped his brow, given him a sharp talking to, told him to get a proper job, and poured a cup of iced tea over his head.

This made O’Brien’s magnificent explosion all the more impressive, just as VVS Laxman’s 281 shone even more brightly because he walked to the wicket with a Test average of 27, and a single century to his name from 20 Tests over four years.

That poor little white ball yesterday must have been wishing it has never been born, as it suffered major impact trauma after major impact trauma, and caused mayhem in the Bangalore Air Traffic Control centre. But it played its part in an unexpected moment of cricketing history. And it told England in the strongest possible language that they need to learn how to use it better as a matter of tournament-saving urgency.

EXTRAS
Three quarters of the way through yesteday’s game, I was pondering the possible content of today’s blog. There was little of interest to that point. England batted well but, like India on Sunday, were unable to accelerate, and Swann had given his team full control of the game, as it followed the internationally agreed pattern for Test Nation v Associate Nation matches.

So the blog was going to be about the atmosphere at game yesterday. And how that atmosphere was brutally obliterated by the inane, intrusive and skull-blastingly loud shards of music detonated into the crowd from the stadium PA system. I can understand why stadiums feel the need to cajole their audience with snippets of completely irrelevant and/or corporately funded music. How else would the crowd know that things like fours, sixes, wickets and Sachin Tendulkar reaching 100 are supposed to be exciting?

However, I struggle to comprehend why that music has to be chundered out at such eardrum-assaulting volumes. Where I was sitting in the Chinnaswamy yesterday, conversation had to stop between every over, after every boundary, and for the entire four minutes of a drinks break, as jingles, score updates and incomprehensible splats of western pop music splintered what little genuine atmosphere there was, in a bizarre quest to render all sporting experiences part of one formless splodge of musically scarred homogeneity.

Please stop it. Please, please stop it. Or at the very least, rein it in. It is annoying, unnecessary and disrespectful to the paying public.

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Boomtown Bangalore and the Bat Bash Bonanza

For those of you unable to stream or download the audio of the World Cup Cricket podcast, below is a transcript of the scripted parts of the show. But it is supposed to be listened to, not read.

This week’s podcast features some thoughts about and sounds from the Bangalore clash between India and England, plus some outright lies.

You can also subscribe to this podcast via iTunes.

The music in the podcast is by Kevin MacLeod.

Hello, cricket fans, and welcome to Bangalore, for the second instalment of Andy Zaltzman’s World Cup Cricket Podcast. I am Andy Zaltzman, author of the Confectionery Stall and Zaltzman On The Road blogs on Cricinfo, three-time Confectionery Stall World Cricketer Of The Year, producer-director of The Miserable Impossibility Of Joy In A Universe Of Unremitting Pain, the as-yet unreleased film trilogy about the batting career of Gary Kirsten, and the only man ever to be dismissed Handled The Umpire in a cricket match. Long story, let’s not go into now.

Later in this week’s podcast, I will be reporting on two titanic games of cricket that took place in Bangalore over the weekend: India v England, a match described as “quite exciting in patches, with bits of useful batting and a mildly diverting finish” by the International Understatement Association; and the Bangalore Brave Hearts against the Hyderabad Nawabs in the inaugural weekend of the Federal Bank cricket league. How would the Brave Hearts cope with the overwhelming pressure of having the pride and reputation of the entire banking sector of Karnataka weighing on their young shoulders?

We will have the second instalment of the Guess What Happened Based On The Sound Of The Crowd quiz. And we will have all the latest Minor Injuries news ahead of this week’s big games.

Amongst the things not in this podcast are: an exclusive interview with former Indian medium-pacer Paras Mhambrey about the dangers of unregulated financial markets and the irresponsibility of modern-day corporate banking; a frame-by-frame analysis of some recently discovered time-lapse film footage of former England one-day specialist Neil Fairbrother eating a pickled egg; or speculation over who would win in a fistfight between Ranjitsinhji and ICC Chief Executive Haroon Lorgat. None of that in this week’s show.

Let’s start with that magnificent game in Bangalore. It might have been a tie, but cricket was the winner. And the good news is that cricket has now qualified for a home quarter-final. Sure, the structure of the tournament is such that it was always likely that cricket would make it through, but still, cricket played a blinder on Sunday.

Captain Prasanna rallies the Bangalore Brave Hearts to bring glory to the city’s banking sector © Andy Zaltzman

The main highlights were of course the magnificent centuries by England captain Andrew Strauss and India’s opening batsman, er, er, what’s his name again, er, S-S-S-Such… Peter Such… Peter Suchin Tendulkar. What a player he would have been. Oh, come on science, make that come true. Make that come true. If you can make a mouse with an ear on its back, or a snake that barks, or a shark with wireless internet, all of which have of course been made (albeit that the shark just swallowed an IT consultant who was windsurfing on his laptop), then you can damn well make Peter Suchin Tendulkar. Come on. I know Sachin guards his privacy understandably carefully, but how hard can it be to take a DNA swab off an international cricketer these days? And Peter Such would willingly give his body to medical science. Make it happen. Earn your government handouts and free lifetime supplies of test tubes for once. I digress.

The evidence of the match might suggest that both teams are like a low-budget hat shop – their bowlers aren’t that great. But the pitch was flatter than an apartment in a skyscraper (hang on, I’m just waiting to see if that comparison stands… oh no, it has been rejected by the World Committee for Similes and Metaphors). So this was a batsman’s game.

And, for this week’s Guess What Happened From The Sound Of The Crowd quiz, question 1, I’m going to play you the sounds made by the Chinnaswamy stadium when Tendulkar and Strauss reached their hundreds. All you have to do is tell me who scored century A, and who scored century B.

Don’t rush your answers. Think about it. Remember Strauss reached his hundred off four fewer balls than Tendulkar, so maybe the crowd were a bit more excited about his 100. Remember also that Tendulkar had scored 97 international hundreds before, compared to Strauss’s 24, so Strauss’s, relatively speaking, has a bit of rarity value. Maybe the Indian crowd has got bored of seeing their man score brilliant hundred after brilliant hundred for more than 20 years. I’m not saying they have, I’m just saying that’s a factor you might like to consider before answering the question. As might be the fact that Tendulkar is a bit older than Strauss, so the crowd might not have wanted to startle him with a loud noise.

Time’s up, pens down, no conferring… Tendulkar’s hundred was clip… A. No it was B. It was B. What a moment to witness for a cricket fan: Sachin at his best in front of his adoring, worshipful home crowd scoring a century of almost painful perfection. As holiday outings go, I would recommend it highly. Very highly. Even more highly than a trip to the crazy golf course in the English seaside resort of Lyme Regis. Even though the windmill there is really impressive. Now I am used to similar waves of adulation when I do stand-up comedy shows. Honestly, all the time it’s like that, every joke... okay, you’ve got me.

But as a newcomer to Asian cricket-watching, it was another magical, almost spiritual, experience, to go with the fervour of the opening match in Dhaka, and life-changing splendour of seeing Robin Peterson bowl a tidy spell for South Africa in Delhi. Imagine Rodin chiselling out one of his better sculptures. In front of 40,000 adoring French art fans. Imagine Charles Dickens, or Chuck D as he was known by his contemporaries, banging out a quick novel on his magic typewriter at a packed London Literodome, the sadly now defunct 60,000-capacity writing arena he used to play at in the 1850s. Imagine Florence Nightingale curing 100 soldiers in an hour in front of a sold-out crowd at a Crimean War Appreciation Society bash. Put them all together and times them by 98. That’s what it was like in the Chinnaswamy. Roughly.

Well played Sachin. You are good at batting. Keep your mind on the game and you’ll go far.

Before going to the game, I had my first attempt at playing cricket on the subcontinent. Some local players were practising on the ground next to ESPNcricinfo’s Bangalore office, so I thought I would test out my cricketing skills against them. Nice idea. However, as it turned out, I did not have any cricketing skills to test out. Zaltzman stumped for 2. An innings that was scratchier than an eczema-suffering dog at a flea convention. (And that one has been approved.)

Like so many English batsmen through cricket history, I failed to adjust to subcontinental conditions. It didn’t help that I hadn’t wielded a bat for 18 months. Nor did it help that I’d never played with a hard red tennis ball before. Nor did it help that I was born with the natural hand-eye co-ordination of a loaf of bread.

It turned out that the guys were the Bangalore Brave Hearts, in final practice for their titanic showdown with the Hyderabad Nawabs. I went back the following morning to see the match, and get a taste of Indian cricket at a lower level. And for this game between the Bangalore and Hyderabad offices of a bank, there was probably about as big a crowd as there was for England v Holland in Nagpur (excluding the schoolkids let in for free, admittedly, but let’s not let facts get in the way of a spurious comparison). And the enthusiasm for the game was plain to see, as captain Prasanna led the Brave Hearts into battle.

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When MS met WG

MS Dhoni is all ears as WG Grace shows him how to quell an impertinent journalist at a press conference © Andy Zaltzman

Another day, another book launch. Stumped, a book of caricatures of the Indian World Cup squad, for which young Malayali artist Shijo Varghese drew the pictures and I wrote the text, was unveiled for the world yesterday by MS Dhoni, aided by Harbhajan Singh, Virat Kohli and Piyush Chawla, who very generously gave their time to attend the launch at a Bangalore hotel.

As you can imagine, there was considerable excitement. Dhoni has wanted to meet me ever since hearing about my match-winning innings of 29 not out for Penshurst Park against Leigh in the titanic West Kent Village League local derby showdown of 1998 (“surely one of the finest knocks by a balding lapsed-Jewish redhead lefthander batting at No. 9 in the history of the West Kent Village League” - EW Swanton, Daily Telegraph). Harbhajan cannot sleep without someone first reading him my latest blog as a bedtime story. Chawla kept asking me for tips on legbreak bowling – in my experience, I told him, the slow, looping full-toss, landing full-pitch on top of middle stump is a very difficult ball to play, particularly if you are bowling down a slope with the sun behind the bowler’s arm. Kohli, meanwhile, took copious notes as I gave him detailed technical advice from my own illustrious batting career on how to score all of your runs behind square on the off side whilst still managing to maintain a steady 20 runs per 100 balls strike-rate against bowlers aged either more than 55 or less than 14.

This was my second book launch. The global unveiling of my first book, a hastily-written effort about the credit crunch in late 2008, involved me sitting at home, opening a package with a couple of copies in it, saying, “Oh good. That looks nice,” and telephoning my mother. There were rather more photographers at this one - when will the paparazzi let me live my own life? - as the local media snapped away feverishly. I stood next to the Indian skipper, feeling distinctly un-photogenic.

The players were charming and courteous with the small assembly at the launch, dutifully signing autographs, and seemed particularly amused by the caricature of Sreesanth. Or perhaps just by the idea of Sreesanth.

In the book, I described Ashish Nehra as being “arguably one of the best four billion fielders in the world”. I asked Dhoni if he agreed with the claim. He replied that it depended whether I meant before or after a six-over spell of bowling.

As you can see from the photograph at the top of this blog, I also introduced MS to another famously two-initialled cricketer, WG Grace. Two cricketing legends and commercial golden geese from very different eras came face to face for the first time.

With their common bond of being icons of their respective times, they seemed to hit it off straight away. They had a lively discussion about the pressures of celebrity, WG advised MS on how to keep playing international cricket up to the age of 50, and then seemed to try to persuade Dhoni to have a word with the Chennai Super Kings’ owners about wangling him an IPL contract. Although the good Doctor has been out of the first-class game for 103 years, so much of modern cricket is about branding, and the WG brand remains instantly recognisable and, potentially at least, financially explosive.

Thanks again, all four of them. And thank you to Graeme Swann for only scoring one run off the last ball of Sunday’s class run-glut, meaning that they were all in a rather chirpier mood than might have been the case. The book, a labour of non-profit-making love by its cricket-mad publisher, which will be available, at some point in the hopefully not too distant future, from cricketcaricatures.com.

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Why Tendulkar is bigger than Woods or Federer

Even Andy Zaltzman's dead grandfather enjoyed watching the game between India and England © Getty Images

I am going to go out on a journalistic limb and say that yesterday’s game in Bangalore was, without question, a decent cricket match. I am sorry if any readers take offence at that, but I am sticking with it. Even my grandfather enjoyed it, and not only has he never really been much of a cricket fan, and as a South African had no emotional affiliation to either side, but he has been dead for 30 years. That is a measure of how exciting this game was – adorned with cricketing brilliance from the start, and topped off with an exploding glacé cherry of a culmination eight hours later.

Even some of the more battle-hardened hacks in the press box seemed to quite enjoy it ‒ I even spotted a couple of half-smiles creeping onto journalistic faces, before the responsibilities of office returned ‒ and there can be no higher compliment for a game of cricket than that.

For me, this was a first experience of seeing India play at home, and of Sachin Tendulkar playing in front of his own people. I chose a good game with which to start. I can think of few, if any, experiences in sport to match watching Tendulkar succeed in a home game. Roger Federer may occupy a similar status of universally-acknowledged greatness within tennis, but I think it is fair to say that Switzerland is not quite as passionate about tennis as India is about cricket. If Federer were to simultaneously play tennis whilst hoarding gold and providing banking facilities for dubious dictators, perhaps the fervour of his support would match that for Sachin. But the Swiss population is unlikely ever to top the one billion mark.

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Why stand-up comedy is like the first day of a Test

Bring a few South Africans in, and you'll be happier © Associated Press

Had someone told me as a child that, at some point in my life, I would jump out of a chair in an office in Bangalore when watching a Bangladesh bowler take an Irish wicket on the television, I would probably not have believed them. Certainly, I had an unquestioning love for cricket from shortly after birth. Possibly, subconsciously, from shortly before birth. I was womb-bound throughout the English Test summer of 1974, which involved a 3-0 drubbing of India and a wet 0-0 against Pakistan. Perhaps my mother, who tragically does not have cricket in her life (may cricket have mercy on her soul), had inadvertently left a radio on whilst Chris Old and Geoff Arnold were skittling Ajit Wadekar’s Indians for 42, leaving me with a lifelong innate respect for nagging English seam bowling. I will have to consult a shrink to be sure.

But leap out of my chair I did. Whilst maintaining strict and irreproachable journalistic objectivity, of course. I must state that I have nothing against Ireland as a team – they were superior for most of the match ‒ or as a nation. Other than one particularly harrowing stand-up gig in Killarney in 2002. But I am prepared to accept that none of the current Ireland squad or management were responsible for booing me off stage on that occasion.

(I have often thought that a stand-up gig can be analysed in terms of the opening session of a Test match. On occasions I have come off stage after a show that went quite well thinking, “92 for 2, not bad, bit of a slow start, and a careless run-out with that ill-advised joke about global warming, but I gradually took control and was stroking it around nicely by the end.” A tough gig might be 76 for 4 – an early clatter of wickets in the face of some hostile heckling, followed by a grim struggle for dignity. A great gig can feel as if Virender Sehwag and Sanath Jayasuriya have cut loose in tandem. At Killarney, I was 42 for 8, with my star routine retired hurt with a badly fractured punchline. It was a tough wicket, the bowling was merciless, and the umpires were biased.)

However, if I may return to my own blog, not only was I enchanted and inspired by Bangladesh’s fervent cricket fans in my brief trip to Dhaka, but it seems to me that the most likely way for this tournament to leave a lasting legacy for the sport is if their team plays well and reaches the quarter-finals at least.

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No rogue snacks please, this is Delhi

Administrative dinosaurism marred the joy of watching a cricket game © Getty Images

A vastly impressive South African performance yesterday was overshadowed by an even more impressive effort by the various security forces in operation at the Feroz Shah Kotla stadium in Delhi. Their indefatigable determination to ensure that no rogue snacks entered the ground was reminiscent of Albert Einstein’s quest to unlock the secrets of the universe.

Those lorryloads of contraband nibbles missed out on being chomped on to the backdrop of a fairly routine match, but one illuminated by two innings of extreme class and an outstanding international debut by much-travelled legspinner Imran Tahir, who gave every impression of being the missing piece in South Africa’s team jigsaw.

This is not to say that, as in previous World Cups, when the pressure cranks into hyperdrive, South Africa will not find a way of dousing that jigsaw in coffee, or letting the Australians tear it up and throw it into a bin, or reading the instructions wrong and feeding it to a dog. But this was an imposing opening by the 1999 and 2003 Sporting-Blooper-Of-The-Year award winners.

Johan Botha has seldom seen the words “bowled an incisive new-ball spell” directly next to his name in match reports, but he should be guzzling those words down with his breakfast this morning. Dale Steyn gives his team the useful option of summoning the world’s greatest bowler in the middle of the traditional mid-innings lull, which is good news for his skipper and spectators alike. And offering an international cricket captain an experienced, accurate, wicket-taking legspinner is like offering a child a large tub of ice cream, and, as Tahir probed and tricked his way through the West Indies middle-order, Graeme Smith spent most of the afternoon with metaphorical chocolate chips all over his grinning face.

Smith himself played a steady supporting role to the electric brilliance of AB de Villiers, who timed the ball through the off side like a champion pudding chef times his soufflees. The South African captain will never be accused of excessive elegance. He often bats as if he had just stepped out of a tumble dryer and is still working out where all his limbs are. At the polar end of the style spectrum is Darren Bravo, who played with almost supernatural panache. He hit one early cover drive off Steyn with such melting perfection that even had the Delhi Police been patrolling the extra-cover boundary, they would have let it pass through untouched. Even if it had water, pens, coins, cameras and cigarettes in its bag. And I can think of no higher compliment for a cricket shot than that.

There has been much criticism of the removal of such objects from paying spectators. An English friend had a bottle of sun cream confiscated, which might have left him vulnerable to the subcontinental sun, but at least prevented him from getting so overexcited by the squelchy noise sun-cream bottles tend to make that he ran onto the pitch and squirted sun-cream all over the wicket, causing the game to be abandoned. No-one wanted to see that.

I had my wallet searched for coins. Intriguingly, I was ordered to put my Indian rupee coins into a charity collection bucket. But I was allowed to keep my British pounds. Has my country’s currency fallen so low in the world’s esteem that it is now viewed as (a) not worth being collected for charity, and (b) so embarrassing to its owner that it would never be used as a missile in a public location?

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England get poor performance out of the way early

Ryan ten Doeschate made a brilliant hundred against England © Getty Images

Nagpur saw a much more entertaining game than most were expecting. England cannily elected to get their worst possible bowling and fielding performance out of the way early on in the tournament to avoid it befalling them in a more important game later, and the Netherlands batted with verve, fielded tenaciously and bowled with discipline to prove that dressing head-to-toe in orange can lead you to the brink of a famous World Cup victory, as well as to the dock in an American court case. If only Allen Stanford had known.

No-one could claim this match represented a marketing triumph for the World Cup. I suppose when you have built a stadium as impressive as the splendid VCA, the last thing you want is people sitting in it and spoiling the aesthetic. Admittedly, England playing the Netherlands in the first week of a marathon tournament in a stadium in the middle of nowhere with minimal-to-zilch transport links would be a hard sell even for the most persuasive of salesmen.

The small crowd that did attend were jaunty and voluble throughout, with a defiantly vocal stadium announcer not merely egging them on, but omeletting them on with an unstoppably loud cocktail of decibels and persistence. He announced bowling changes and score updates as if they were rock legends. He announced that the bowling was not being changed with equal gusto. He announced announcements that no-one had previously thought needed announcing. And then he announced some more. It was a sterling performance.

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Why we need three games a day

Here is the script of episode one of Andy Zaltzman’s World Cup podcast, featuring an interview with a Bangladesh fan in Fatullah, and some fantastic audio footage of the crowd at the World Cup opening match, plus some of Andy’s usual cricketous garbage.

If you have any questions you would like Andy to attempt to answer in the next podcast, please use the Ask Andy box on the right to send them in.

Hello, welcome to my first World Cup Cricket podcast. Later in the show, I’ll be talking to a Bangladesh cricket fan about his country and its tournament, I’ll be putting you on the spot with the inaugural Guess What Happened Based On The Sound Of The Crowd quiz, and there’s something from the opening game in Mirpur to give you a taste of the eye-popping atmosphere of cricket as a social sport breaking new ground, all whilst the actual game itself provided a largely predictable win for the old order against the new. That’s not to say it was boring. If anyone tells you that watching Virender Sehwag score 175 is boring, do not trust them. Shun them from your life, report them to the police, and check your pockets. Sehwag could probably make brushing his teeth exciting. It would probably end up with toothpaste all over the bathroom, but Sehwag marching out with a gleaming set of tusks shining from his magical mouth.

Among the things not in this week’s World Cup Cricket podcast are: an exclusive interview with former Hollywood film starlet Marlene Dietrich on whether Zimbabwe can make any impact on this tournament; a fly-on-the-thigh-pad secret recording of New Zealand’s Daniel Vettori breaking his personal best score in a game of Scrabble against Brendon McCullum; or ICC big cheese Haroon Lorgat singing the classic 1970s disco classic “I Will Survive”. All that, not in the show.

Now, let’s be honest, the highlights of the tournament so far have mostly been off the pitch. On it, we’ve had one comfortable victory and two absolute hammerings in favour of the older cricket nations. Still, only four weeks of the group stage left, so chins up everyone.

There has been much debate about the format of this World Cup, and in particular of the next one, provisionally subtitled: “Closed Shop 2015 – Keeping The Riffraff Where They Belong”. Now, admittedly, few people would claim the Associates have covered themselves in glory in their first two games. Maybe only a mathematics denier who had been hit on the head with a fire extinguisher, or a hard-nut golf fan – to quote Ernie Els from yesterday: “I don’t understand, Canada hit the ball far far less often than Sri Lanka, and yet you’re telling me they lost… no, I’m not falling for that. Looks like a Canada-Kenya final all the way for me…”

But I can’t help but think cricket is shooting the wrong elephant here. Like other sports that are popular in only a small number of countries, finding a format for a World Cup that isn’t scarred by tedious early mismatches and/or unwieldily long (unwieldily is an appropriate word for itself, isn’t it), is a real test for the organisers. Rugby union has had the same problem. When your number of teams is not divisible by 4, you have to get creative with the format, and some of the recent ones dreamt up look like they were the result of a drunken night out and a discussion with Salvador Dali.

For cricket, this has been a problem ever since the number of teams crept up above eight back in 1992. Obviously, some in high places in cricket wouldn’t mind going back to eight. Some would even like to go back to four. And some of those would like those four to be India, India, India and India.

For me, though, the main problem is the refusal to play enough games quickly enough. In this World Cup, teams are having to wait five, six days between matches. Finding enough diverting hobbies to stop themselves going stir crazy could be as important as more traditional crucial parts of the game, such as putting things in areas, not any areas, only the right ones, or executing things, plans and strategies mostly, preferably not wills or people.

How about this, cricket fans. A 16-team tournament. Four groups of four. Three games for each team, taking 12 days, with two games a day. The top two go into a second group phase. Again, 12 days, top two in the semis. Then semis and a final in the last week. Bang. Maximum five weeks, lots of important matches between the big teams, giving the tournament a chance to build up momentum, a showcase for the smaller teams – which would be further enhanced if the third-placed teams from the group stage then go into a plate competition, a four-team round robin leading to a final in between the semis and final of the main tournament. With the winner earning automatic qualification for the Champions Trophy, or some other prize of their choosing – a go in a space rocket, dinner and karaoke with Scarlett Johansson, or pole vault lessons from Russians jumping over high bars using a bendy stick like legend Sergei Bubka, or the chance to own ICC umpire Billy Bowden for a year. Do the washing up, Billy. And then sing me a lullaby.

You could even condense the schedule down even further, have three games a day… a standard day-nighter starting at 2pm in the afternoon; then a night-night game from 10pm to 6am; then a morning-daytime game from 6am until 2pm. Bingo, 24-hour cricket. The advertisers would be birthing themselves with excitement. You could tweak it so you introduce the intriguing tactical possibility of teams deciding whether or not to send in a tailender as a breakfast watchman.

Get back to me on that one, ICC. But if you use it, I want to do a gig at the opening ceremony.

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If you’ve reading my On the Road with Zaltzman blog postings on ESPNcricinfo, you’ll know that I have found my first trip to Asia rather exciting so far. I found Bangladesh and its enthusiasm for cricket utterly captivating. The England v Pakistan warm-up match in Fatullah – a warm-up match, between two neutral teams, remember – was played out in front of a packed and noisy house. Whilst there, I sat in among the local cricket fans. Do you think I (a) blended in seamlessly, or (b) stuck out like a thumb that was not merely sore but had been freshly hammered with an unusually angry mallet? Your guess.

And I spoke to a young man from Dhaka whom I met in the Fatullah stands, who expressed what seemed to be the universal feelings of pride and excitement about Bangladesh’s biggest ever sporting event.

INTERVIEW WITH ASHUK (In audio)

Thanks again to Ashuk and his friends, who were fantastically welcoming and bought me a chicken sandwich. Something that has never happened to me at The Oval.

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Two breathtaking days in Dhaka

Virender Sehwag's onslaught quelled the Dhaka crowd's expectations © Associated Press

Day two of my Asian cricket watching career. A stunning and joyous occasion for fans of cricket, Bangladesh, and the sound of 35,000 people hitting major decibel levels like Glenn McGrath used to hit a good length. But a slightly disappointing match. Bangladesh never looked likely to win from the moment that Virender Sehwag’s eyes fell deeply in love with a loosener by Shafiul Islam, and instructed Sehwag’s bat to tell the loosener the full extent of their affections by obliterating it for four.

Despite the long-inevitable Indian victory, the crowd treated cricket to an almost unbroken eight-hour noise marathon. In the early stages, they were cheering rudimentary pieces of ground fielding as if Nelson Mandela had just ridden into the ground on a unicorn, discovered a cure for all known diseases live on stage, and then breakdanced on his head to the tune of a Beethoven’s piano sonata.

The early fever was quelled by India’s two great openers, who were given the chance to dictate the match by Shakib Al Hasan’s decision to bowl first. It looked like it would take something special to remove Tendulkar, and it did. Unfortunately, that something special was not a devastating piece of bowling, but a piece of sub-schoolboy running between the wickets. Sehwag appeared to be preoccupied – maybe he was checking his emails on his Blackberry, or trying to remember a recipe for Crepes Suzette, or thinking about whether table tennis has any rules. Whatever it was, he was not paying attention, the TV replay showed Sachin Tendulkar narrowly short of his ground by approximately 19.8 yards, and the dismissal uncorked a Jeroboam of bedlam in the stands.

When asked afterwards if he felt he had done anything wrong, Sehwag replied “not much”. Perhaps the impression watching from the roof of the press box was misleading – perhaps it was Tendulkar’s own fault. Sehwag explained further: “He was calling and I was not listening. And I was looking at the ball.” This man is a hero – if that constitutes doing “not much” wrong in a needless run-out, let us all hope he really, genuinely messes up a single at some point in the tournament. It could be spectacular.

Other than that little glitch, cricket’s greatest cavalier was almost perfect. If you can score 175 off 140 balls, even on a flat pitch, and then have learned sages in the press box comment that you have played “with uncharacteristic restraint”, then you are, certifiably, supernaturally good at batting. His innings, well supported by Gautam Gambhir and Virat Kohli, force-jammed that cork firmly back into the Jeroboam bottle.

The build-up to this game had a sense of a new beginning for cricket. The match itself was a decisive reassertion of the status quo. From Sehwag’s first-ball clonking of Shafiul to the cover boundary, India’s powerhouse batting issued a strong-worded press release to the other teams in the tournament, but it was never tested, and their bowling was mostly competent without fully allaying any fears that it might be vulnerable somewhere along the way. Bangladesh’s batsmen scored enough runs to ensure this comprehensive defeat was not the statistical and psychological drubbing into which it could easily have turned. The expectancy balloon may have been punctured, but at least it wasn’t stamped on, javelined or fed to a bear.

So, the festival is underway. For me, Dhaka and Bangladesh have been a captivating delight. The atmosphere in the stadiums on the two days so far was unlike anything I have ever witnessed. Admittedly, I have not witnessed especially many things in my very British life, but these have been two breathtaking days. When that over by Sreesanth went for 24, it felt as if the stadium was about to blast off into space (where zero gravity might have nullified some of India’s advantage). For the second consecutive World Cup match in Asia featuring India, the stadium was aflame. Metaphorically here, literally in 1996. More on this in the first World Cup podcast, coming up on Monday, including a “Guess What Happened On This Ball Based On The Noise The Crowd Was Making” quiz.

Now begins the more testing part for the tournament – the elongated group phase, with some potential mismatches looming and the perennial problem of the neutral match. It will be fascinating to chart its progress. The schedule and format leaves this World Cup vulnerable to a serious loss of momentum. Will the fans elsewhere embrace it with Dhaka’s mesmeric, untainted enthusiasm? Can the Bangladesh team keep that enthusiasm burning? Can the Canada v Kenya match-up enthuse the people of Delhi sufficiently to ensure a 48,000 sell-out in March?

As Aristotle used to say, “The potato is out of the oven, but only the fork will tell us if it is cooked.” Admittedly, he used to say this when he was very old, a little confused, and living in a home for retired philosophers, and no one really knows what he was talking about (particularly as potatoes were unheard of in Europe at that time, even to a brainbox like Aristotle). They just used to pat him on his clever head and tell him he was right. But let us hope that by April, the jubilant fervour of Dhaka is not merely a hazy memory of what might have been for the World Cup and for cricket.

EXTRAS

Every time I go to see India play a World Cup match, someone scores exactly 175. At between 125 and 127 runs per 100 balls. It is starting to become tedious. First Kapil Dev spanks a century-and-three-quarters off 138 balls at Tunbridge Wells in 1983, now Sehwag plonks the same score off 140 deliveries in Mirpur in 2011. When will it end? They will be queuing up to bat against England in Bangalore.

I wrote in a recent blog about that legendary 1983 match, and being too scared to ask for Sunil Gavaskar’s autograph. Yesterday, 28 years later, my Cricinfo editor introduced me to him, and the great opener rectified that regretful outbreak of boyhood cowardice. It felt a bit odd asking for an autograph as a 36-year-old, but given that in essence it was merely the completion of a request that began internally when I was eight, so it’s fine.

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A first experience of cricket in Asia

The scoreboard at the Shere Bangla National Stadium waits in eager anticipation for the opening game of the World Cup © ESPNcricinfo

My first full day in Dhaka began with a fortuitously-timed rickshaw ride (my debut on the transport mode of choice for all right-thinking international cricket captains these days), which dropped me at the Shere Bangla National Stadium just as the Bangladesh squad was arriving in its team bus. I have never seen a bus earn such a rousing reception just for turning up somewhere, not even an unusually delayed N159 night bus from Trafalgar Square to Streatham. I just hope the Tigers’ team bus can cope with the levels of expectation on its journey to the stadium on the big day today. It would be an enormous shame if, when the pressure of a nation is on it, and with the powerful Indian bus looming in its wing-mirror, the Bangladesh bus takes a wrong turn and ends up taking the team to a cinema or furniture shop instead.

I imagine all cricket fans are hoping that Shakib Al Hasan and his team are inspired rather than intimidated by the frenzy of hopeful excitement in their nation. Personally, I usually wilt under the pressure if my wife is watching me boil an egg, so I cannot imagine what it must be like for a young, emerging team to shoulder the aspirations of their country. Even the scoreboard looked excited on Friday morning.

If Bangladesh perform well against India, even in defeat, I think they will have a strong tournament. India should be too strong.

Continue reading "A first experience of cricket in Asia"

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The sizzle of anticipation

Bryan Adams gets to the crux of his audio-enhanced presentation on how to nurdle the ball just far enough for a single © Getty Images

I arrived in Dhaka on Thursday evening, to scenes of understandably wild jubilation. People thronged the streets, horns were honked at my taxi as it weaved through the traffic, the route from the airport was festooned with flashing lights, joyous rickshaws laden with cheering cricket fans sped past. All for the humble author of a humble cricket blog. This place must really love cricket.

It has been suggested by other members of the ESPNcricinfo team that, given that my arrival coincided with the opening ceremony, some of the festivities might not have been exclusively in my honour. Some even went so far as to suggest that street-thronging and horn-honking are by no means unusual events in this buzzingly excited city. I will let others be the judge of that. Suffice it to say that, as I recall, there was not quite the same sizzle of anticipation when England hosted the 1999 tournament. There was barely even a fizzle of anticipation. There seems little chance of the World Cup slipping under the public radar this time.

Little could be read into the team captains’ opening ceremony rickshaw ride in terms of predicting how the tournament will progress. Strauss was giving little away about the likely make-up of the England XI for their opening game with the Dutch in Nagpur as he sat in his rickshaw, waving at the crowd, whilst Shahid Afridi seemed unperturbed by the recent turbulence in his nation’s cricket as he sat in his rickshaw, waving at the crowd. Mahendra Singh Dhoni sat in his rickshaw, waving at the crowd with quiet confidence, whilst Ricky Ponting sat in his rickshaw, waving at the crowd as if he had fully recovered from the devastating psychological sledgehammer blow of losing Nathan Hauritz to injury. It’s all very tactically cagey at this stage.

(I missed seeing the opening ceremony as I was in transit at the time, although it must have been disappointing for all those watching live and on TV that, due to a confusion in the booking process, Bryan Adams performed some of his classic rock hits. It was supposed to have been Jimmy Adams, delivering a Powerpoint lecture about how to nudge the ball to deep square-leg for a single.)

Today I will have my first experience of watching cricket outside England, as Strauss and Afridi lead their teams in a final warm-up in Fatullah. I imagine the atmosphere might not be quite as febrile as it will be in the Shere Bangla Stadium on Saturday, but I am almost childishly excited about it anyway.

Having overestimated my ability to write a tournament preview whilst on an aeroplane, my tournament preview will now appear late on Friday or early on Saturday, depending on where you are in the world. And when I finish it.

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