World Cup 2015 on cusp of thrilling finale
With Australia, South Africa, India and New Zealand, the semifinal lineup is composed of hungry, confident teams, with nothing to separate them
Auckland: This World Cup has been a long tournament. The league stretched patience at times, taking as long to conclude as the entire football world cup. Even the Melbourne Grand Prix was wrapped up over a weekend in March. The pace of the cricket world cup has been more akin to a lumbering elephant.
The fear in a tournament of this duration is that merit may not always prevail. Teams cannot blitz their way through the world cup, like Sri Lanka did in 1996. A team has to shift not one but several gears, which comes with the corresponding risk of losing momentum. Given all these caveats, it seems a minor miracle that the four best teams of this World Cup have made it to the semifinals. New Zealand and Australia, the top two teams in Pool A, join India and South Africa, teams likewise placed in Pool B, to make up the last four of this tournament.
It has not always been thus. In 1996 and 2011, the previous editions with the same format, the vicissitudes of a knockout tournament won over consistency. In 1996, all four teams from Pool A made it to the semifinals, with even fourth-placed West Indies eliminating Pool B leaders South Africa. In 2011, India was the sole Pool A representative in the semi-finals, eliminating three Pool B contenders—Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka—in its march to the title.
In that unpredictability lies the allure of a knockout tournament, but in past editions, an upset in the quarterfinal often made the subsequent knockout game a lopsided one. New Zealand stunned South Africa in 2011 but were comfortably overcome, despite some late jitters, by Sri Lanka in the semifinal.
The quarterfinals in 2015 may have been predictable and hopelessly one-sided, but conversely this means that we may be heading towards the most tightly contested pair of World Cup semifinals since 1992. Usually, in recent editions, there has been a clear favourite in at least one of the semifinals: Sri Lanka against New Zealand in 2011, India against Kenya in 2003 and Pakistan against New Zealand in 1999.
No such claims can be made of 2015. The semifinal lineup of this tournament is composed of hungry, confident teams, who have declared their intent towards the championship right from the beginning of the world cup. There is nothing to separate them.
Even so, the first semifinal evokes more a sentiment of novelty. South Africa and New Zealand have been the World Cup’s nearly-men, for different reasons.
The Proteas’ world cups have followed a dispiriting pattern: domination of the group stage, followed by emotional disintegration in the knockouts. It is a story that baffled sports psychologists and analysts for decades. Exquisitely talented South African teams have been united across generations not only by their myriad gifts, but also by an unfathomable mental fragility.
New Zealand, on the other hand, a nation of only 4 million, have consistently overachieved, reaching the semifinals for the seventh time now. Yet, time after time, their world cup runs have been accompanied by a time limit, as if they were mandated by law to progress no further. They have been eliminated at this stage with as much consistency as they have reached it, felled by the strange inferiority complex that afflicts the Kiwi soul.
2015 is different. Both teams seem to have confronted, and junked, the demons of the past. The South Africans won their first knockout game in 23 years of trying. New Zealand, under the bulldog-style captaincy of Brendon McCullum, resemble more their larger neighbours from across the Tasman than teams from their own past.
Both teams find themselves in uncharted territory. The refreshing aspect, from a neutral’s perspective, is that the World Cup is guaranteed a new finalist in 2015.
If New Zealand and South Africa appear on the cusp of writing a new history for themselves, it is the past that may define the battle between Australia and India.
The two most successful teams in the knockout stages of the World Cup, Australia and India are the wily giants of this tournament. In the recent past, glory for one has mostly come at the direct cost of the other. Australia mercilessly crushed India’s challenge in 2003, while in 2011, India ended the dynasty whose reign stretched all the way back to 1999.
The most remarkable aspect of these two combatants is that there is none of the mental fragility or social inferiority that has marked the history of the other semi-finalists. These are teams that expect to be here. They just instinctively belong at this stage of the tournament, at home in the pressure.
The first semifinal in Auckland will be determined as much by the battle within, with two teams confronting their past as much as the opposition. In the second semi-final at Sydney, such inner battles will be firmly relegated to the background. India and Australia are one-day machines, purring sedans differentiated more by model than make or size. This will be a heavyweight joust—some say a de facto final—and it may once again define not just the history of these two teams, but the history of the World Cup itself.
If India, after defeating Australia, do go on to win a second title in succession, their tally of three will soon be threatening what seemed Australia’s impregnable four titles. On the other hand, if Australia prevail, their five championships will effectively make them cricket’s equivalent of what Brazil is to football—and a tally that has no chance of being overhauled for a couple of generations.
An epic is waiting to be written. It promises to be a gripping week.
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