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World Cup Cricket 1996
Sri Lanka Won the World Cup
There were some good, uplifting aspects to the sixth cricket
World Cup, not least the style and smiles of its unsuspected
winners, Sri Lanka, but overall this was not a tournament
to linger fondly in the memory. Wounded by events beyond
its control even before its opening, the competition proceeded
to frustrate and bewilder through an interminable and largely
irrelevant saga of group games in India, Pakistan and Sri
Lanka before hastening frantically through its knockout
games in little more than a week.
The event was poorly conceived in its format and its
logistics and suffered throughout from the threat –
and ultimately the reality – of crowd disorder.
The abandonment of the semi-final at Eden Gardens, Calcutta,
following bottle-throwing and fire-lighting on the terraces,
was a shameful reflection on standards of sportsmanship
in an area until recently renowned for its appreciation
of all things good in the game of cricket.
Perhaps, however, we should not be too harsh on the individuals
responsible for the riot in Calcutta. They were merely
responding to the seductions created for them by the promoters
of the Wills World Cup, an event that plainly, disastrously,
put money-making above all the fundamentals of organising
a global sporting competition. As the glamorising of the
Indian and Pakistani cricketers reached new and absurd
heights, so too did the unshakeable belief of the masses
in their invincibility. Defeat, of the kind that came
to India that night in Calcutta, was popularly unimaginable,
with consequences for which many must share the blame.
It was all markedly at odds with the 1987 World Cup,
also co-hosted by India and Pakistan and widely judged
to be an organisational triumph. Players and observers
alike enjoyed that competition far more than the 1996
event. Yet the paradox is that, when the accounts were
complete, they showed a negligible profit. Within a decade,
the profile of the game had altered substantially; so
too, it transpired, had the methods and ambitions of those
charged with running the tournament. Suddenly, it was
deemed more important to register a company as supplier
of official chewing gum – and take its money –
than to pay proper attention to the welfare of the competing
teams. Of course, it is possible to become too nannyish
about professional sportsmen, who by and large lead a
pretty pampered existence, but the wearisome travel schedules,
illogical playing itineraries and inadequate practice
facilities inflicted on most of the visiting teams would
have caused a serious rebellion had this been a football
championship.
In fact, such elementary flaws should have been dealt
with at source, long before they became a millstone around
the event. The reason they were not – the handing
over by the International Cricket Council of all responsibility
for the tournament to the World Cup committee, Pilcom
– reflects poorly on all those responsible. What
function does ICC perform if it is not to be a vigilant
monitor of events like this? Cricket must never permit
such complacency again.
ICC must also take the blame for the format. The expansion
of the field to 12, from nine in 1992, was quite right.
By embracing three of ICC’s Associate Members, the
non-Test countries, the World Cup was fulfilling its missionary
aim (though whether the Associates, wooed by financial
guarantees, had too much say in the venue is another serious
matter for ICC to consider). The problem arose when the
extra teams were accommodated by a complete change from
the successful 1992 system, a round-robin producing four
semi-finalists. Instead, the teams were divided into two
groups of six, from which not four but eight sides would
proceed to the knockout rounds. The effect of this, obvious
in advance, was to reduce virtually a month of cricket
to the status of little more than practice games: duly,
almost inevitably, the three Associate nations and the
junior Test-playing team, Zimbabwe, were eliminated.
All this could have been avoided, and a genuinely competitive
group programme installed, by discarding the idea of quarter-finals
and going straight to a last four. Presumably, the attraction
of four big crowds, four big television games, was too
great, but this was a decision taken on flawed grounds.
The people were not all fooled; the group games in Pakistan,
particularly, drew very small crowds.
The logistical chaos of the competition stemmed largely
from the decision, laudable in theory but utterly unrealistic,
to spread the tournament to virtually every corner of
the vast country of India. The 17 games scheduled for
the country were all staged in different cities and insufficient
attention had been paid to the practicalities of moving
teams (let alone television crews and media people) between
games. Travel in India is problematical at best; a few
specific alterations were made to airline schedules to
oblige the competition organisers but nowhere near enough
to surmount the problem, the size of which became clear
during the first, eventful weekend. The teams were all
due to gather in Calcutta for a variety of briefing meetings
before the much-vaunted opening ceremony, a celebration
of technology for which the organisers had outlaid considerable
capital.
As it transpired, however, the weekend was dominated
by the issue of two teams, Australia and West Indies,
adamantly refusing to play their scheduled group games
in Colombo. The bomb blast in the city, a fortnight earlier,
was the clinching factor, but Australia’s players
were already uncomfortable about visiting Sri Lanka, with
whom they had just played an acrimonious Test series.
In truth, they were reluctant to participate in the Cup
at all, the backwash of their bribery allegations against
Salim Malik having brought threats of an unpleasant nature
from a number of fanatics around Pakistan. West Indies
had far less reason for prudence on the Colombo issue,
but the condemnatory tone of the organisers against the
two defectors gave the episode an unwarranted tone, intensified
by a press conference that touched heights of incoherent
rancour. It was even suggested that Australia and West
Indies were indulging in a vendetta against the Third
World, until it was gently pointed out, by ICC’s
chairman, Sir Clyde Walcott, that the Caribbean forms
part of the Third World.
Positions being entrenched, the matches were forfeited,
though it was a commentary on the cosiness of the format
that Australia and West Indies could make such a sacrifice
without seriously endangering their progress to the business
end of the tournament. Sri Lanka were both winners and
losers – winners because they received four points,
and a comfortable passage to the last eight, without playing,
but losers because their lovely island was deprived of
its two biggest matches at a time when the public was
most in need of rousing diversions. For them, however,
the grandest of compensations awaited.
The opening ceremony was attended by more than 100,000
people, most of whom must have left wondering what on
earth they had been watching. The laser show malfunctioned,
the compère was embarrassing and the grand launch
was a complete flop – so much so that there were
subsequent calls at Calcuttan government level for the
arrest of the Pilcom convenor, Jagmohan Dalmiya, on a
charge of wasting public money.
At 4 a.m. the following morning, four teams gathered
blearily in the lobby of Calcutta’s Oberoi hotel.
They were all slated for the 6 a.m. flight to Delhi (India’s
internal flights tend to run before dawn and after dusk),
whereafter they were required to wait many hours before
connecting to flights for their various first-game destinations.
Had no one thought of organising a charter flight at a
civilised hour? Apparently not.
Given this, the choice of the unlovely city of Ahmedabad,
and the teams of England and New Zealand, for the opening
game of the tournament, should perhaps not seem curious.
It was, however, a deflating start, and not just for England,
whose obsolete one-day tactics and lack of specific preparation
for the only limited-overs event that matters were exposed
from the beginning. England were destined to win only
two games in the competition, both against non-league
opposition, and one of those, against Holland, by an unflatteringly
narrow margin. Their players had come to the event tired
and unfocused, which was not entirely their fault, but
the need for a progressive team manager to replace Raymond
Illingworth became ever clearer as their ill-fated campaign
continued. England once dictated the terms in one-day
cricket; unnoticed by them, other countries have caught
up and left them behind, developing new and innovative
ways of overcoming the essentially negative restrictions
of the overs game.
The use of pinch-hitters was one such method, much discussed
and granted more significance than it merited, but it
was certainly the case that the successful teams no longer
looked to accrue the majority of their runs in the closing
overs of their innings. Instead of settling for 60 or
70 runs from the initial 15 overs, when fielding restrictions
applied, teams were now looking to pass the 100 mark.
On the blissful batting pitches encountered here, it was
seldom impossible. Sri Lanka, through their fearless openers,
Sanath Jayasuriya – later to be named the Most Valued
Player of the Tournament – and Romesh Kaluwitharana,
were the trendsetters and, as the outcome proved, nobody
did it better. Jayasuriya’s assault on England’s
bowling in the quarter-final at Faisalabad was authentic,
aggressive batting without insult to the coaching manual.
There were some memorable images from the over-long group
stages. Mark Taylor’s sportsmanship, in refusing
to claim a slip catch at a pivotal stage against West
Indies, was one; the imperious batting of Mark Waugh and Sachin Tendulkar provided more. But the majority involved
the minnow nations. The best of them was the catch by
Kenya’s portly, bespectacled and none-too-nimble
wicket-keeper, Tariq Iqbal, to dismiss Brian Lara. That
it led to a Kenyan victory by 73 runs was part of the
romance; here was the greatest upset the World Cup has
known and, perhaps, a salutary lesson to a West Indies
team that had become surly and unattractive. Kenya played
their cricket as the West Indians once loved to do, without
inhibition; defeat paradoxically restored pride to West
Indies. They not only rallied to reach the last eight
– roused by 93 not out from their beleaguered captain,
Richie Richardson, against Australia – but, there,
beat the team that had hitherto looked the slickest in
the event, South Africa.
The two main host nations predictably reached the quarter-finals
but it was not in the preferred script that they should
meet each other so soon. Bangalore had the dubious honour
of staging the game and this beautiful, bustling city
has never known such an event. The fact that India won
it, before an intensely partisan crowd, perhaps averted
the kind of disgraceful scenes witnessed four days later
in Calcutta, where Sri Lanka utterly outplayed the Indians.
In the other semi-final, Australia recovered from an apparently
hopeless position to beat West Indies, whose collective
nerve crumbled.
Thus was created a meeting, in the final, between two
teams who were prevented by politics and expediency from
playing each other earlier. Sri Lanka’s victory
was to the great approval and acclaim of much of the cricketing
world. It was also a result that, to some degree, rescued
this World Cup from an abiding image of bungling mediocrity.
The tournament achieved one aim in increasing the profile
of cricket, through television coverage on an impressive
but largely uncritical scale, and undoubtedly it satisfied
the organisers in the amount of money accrued. But the
impression was that the cricket was secondary to the commercialism.
Even in a game newly awakened to its financial opportunities,
that cannot be right.
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