Kiwi charge recalls the Lankan spirit of 1996
New Zealand on verge of recreating a sporting fairytale that stunned world cricket nineteen years ago
Melbourne: The conventional wisdom ahead of this World Cup final is as follows: New Zealand have played wonderful cricket throughout this tournament and deserve to reach this stage of the tournament. But—and here comes the pejorative catch—they have not played in Australia before. They have not played in a World Cup final before. With no past history of being at this juncture, surely it’s not unrealistic to assume they might just crack at a hostile away ground?
For anyone immersed in cricket history, the narrative has a familiar feel to it. Two decades ago, another small nation, without an illustrious past to provide succour, was patronized in a similar way.
In 1996, Sri Lanka too was the smaller co-host that had won all its group-stage games. The naysayers suggested that, since all its knockout games would be away from home, its chances for the title were close to negligible.
From the vantage point of today, Sri Lanka’s achievement in 1996 appears all the more staggering. They played their quarterfinal in Faisalabad, becoming the first of many sides since 1992 to thrash the English out of the tournament. They would return to Pakistan again for the final at Lahore’s Gaddafi Stadium, an arena larger than any in Sri Lanka.
But their greatest feat, without doubt, was defeating India in the semifinal at an intimidating Eden Gardens, swelled way past its then-capacity of 100,000. A quick YouTube search reveals the pure mania of that time, during the apogee of cricket jingoism in the subcontinent.
For a nation that had lived under the shadow of its larger Asian neighbours, it must have been nothing short of terrifying. It even makes New Zealand’s task at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday appear fairly humdrum.
There are more parallels still. In the 1990s, an age when teams believed in preserving wickets and accelerating towards the end, Sri Lanka completely reversed that logic, changing one-day cricket forever. The style of Arjuna Ranatunga’s charges was to go on an all-out assault on the docile pitches of the subcontinent. It is why Sri Lanka in that tournament loved chasing; the early assault by Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana would relieve the pressure on the lower order and make the target seem easy pudding.
While Ranatunga changed cricket by empowering batsmen in an era when bowlers seemed dominant, Brendon McCullum has fostered cricket’s evolution from the opposite end. In an era when flat wickets and ever more powerful bats have combined to make bowlers an irrelevance, the New Zealand captain has sought to redress the balance urging his bowlers to reclaim their role as threatening predators.
“New Zealand are remaking cricket," writer Simon Barnes said recently. “It’s as if the cricketing world had suddenly worked out that when a batsman is out, he can’t score any more runs."
One of the most remarkable sights of the World Cup has to be Trent Boult bowling in the semifinal against South Africa at Eden Park—a ground with perhaps the shortest straight boundary in cricket—with four slips and a gully. It was as if McCullum had mistaken the game for a Test match.
Sports teams are strange beasts. Poor chemistry and distrust can destroy them from within, as currently the case with England. On the other hand, there are moments in a team’s evolution where the synergy is close to perfection; the cliché of teammates driving each other to heights they didn’t imagine possible. New Zealand are currently riding such a wave; Daniel Vettori’s wonder catch against the West Indies in the quarterfinal providing the clearest evidence of the fact.
This unstoppable momentum of one side or another at a point of time is what makes team sport so compelling. From the outside, the utter mystery of a team’s alchemy also makes its trajectory impossible to predict. So much of sport is about belief, and sometimes teams have achieved things simply because they believed they could. Liverpool’s Miracle of Istanbul may be the most potent illustration of this.
It is why we should beware of the easy predictions that New Zealand’s time in the tournament is done. The Kiwis may well lose, but let’s not be so sure about the prospect. The same was said of another team that faced Australia in the final nearly two decades ago. Sport has a way of mocking certitudes.
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