Dharmasena and Muralitharan, the front-line spinners, had completed their quota of overs, but Ranatunga decided not to bring back his seam bowlers, Vaas and Wickremasinghe. Throughout the Cup, he had relied on his part-time slow bowlers to frustrate the opposition, and he did so now, calling on Jayasuriya and De Silva to finish off the innings. Thanks to Bevan’s improvising, the Australians put on 33 runs for the last five overs without losing any more wickets. Jayasuriya beat him through the air, but Kaluwitherana fumbled the stumping. In the field, the Sri Lankans maintained the pressure. Even the rotund Ranatunga threw himself full-length to cut off a single, and Wickremasinghe redeemed his patchy bowling by steaming across the turf to stop Bevan’s reverse sweep reaching the rope. Murali, fast on his feet, with a swift pick-up and hard, accurate throw, performed wonders in the deep. In the forty-ninth over Bevan made room to strike a leg side delivery high over extra cover. It was a strange inside-out shot which he repeated off Jayasuriya in the final over; these were the only two boundaries in his innings of 36 not out off 49 balls.
To have restricted the Australians to 241 for 7 after their brilliant early dash for runs was an achievement. But was 241 still too many? A run rate of 4.84 per over would not normally be a daunting target for this Sri Lankan side, but the Australians had successfully defended a smaller total against the West Indies at Chandigarh. The consensus in the press box was that the Sri Lankans would fall short. On a turning wicket, the Australians could call not only on Shane Warne but on Mark Waugh and Michael Bevan. All three turned the ball away from the left-hander, and the Sri Lankan side was packed with left-handers. Everything, it was said, would depend on Jayasuriya and Kaluwitherana, the opening batsmen. An early onslaught of the type they had made famous in the course of the Cup would enable Sri Lanka to mount a challenge. An Indian friend shook his head sadly and sceptically: ‘They won’t get it. Not on this pitch. Not under floodlights. Not against Australia. Not in a World Cup final.’ And no team batting second had ever won the World Cup. . .
The Australians took the field to a mix of cheers and boos. In the second over, Jayasuriya tipped the ball to third man, took a single, then set off on a second run. The television replay showed that McGrath’s throw from the deep had beaten him by a millisecond. The Australian bowlers ran in at full tilt, seeking quick wickets, and Kalu looked nervous. In the sixth over he pulled Fleming to Bevan at square leg. For the second successive match, the feared Sri Lankan openers had destroyed themselves in a wanton fit. It was 23 for 2 and I was despondent. Surely no team could stage a miraculous recovery from early disaster twice in succession: 241 suddenly seemed a formidable total. When an edgy De Silva nearly ran himself out backing up too far I wondered if the Sri Lankans were finally going to crack.
McGrath’s line and length were unerring during his first spell, and Gurusinha and De Silva contented themselves with playing their shots off the less consistent Fleming. In Australia, De Silva, frustrated by the umpires and upset at the allegations, had fared poorly with the bat. He had averaged more than 50 in the World Cup so far but now he faced, for the first time in the competition, a well-rounded attack and an aggressive captain. Taylor brought Warne on and the field in for the eleventh over. The aerial route and the short boundaries beckoned, but De Silva kept the ball along the ground. He cut Warne late with a full swing of the bat, then opened the blade to stroke the next ball backward of point. The last ball of the over was a googly. It took the inside edge of De Silva’s bat, barely missed the stumps and somehow evaded Healy’s grasp. My heart skipped a beat. A furrow appeared between Warne’s bleached eyebrows.
In Calcutta, De Silva mastered the Indian attack and the ball was his to do with as he willed. In Lahore, conditions (and the opposition) were more awkward. The dew on the field was heavy and scoring required luck and perseverance. In an attempt to step up the run rate, Gurusinha and De Silva embarked on quick singles, but the tactic seemed to put more pressure on the batsmen than the fielders, who pounced eagerly to cut off the drives and flicks. Warne, mixing googlies and leg breaks, tied down Gurusinha. De Silva cut and drove through the narrow gaps. His 360-degree field awareness seemed uncanny. After 15 overs, Sri Lanka had reached 71 for 2, level with the asking rate. Gurusinha lofted Mark Waugh over mid-off, where Fleming skidded past the ball, which ran to the boundary – the second difficult chance the Australians had missed.
A huge roar erupted from the bank of seats to our right. Javed Miandad had been spotted. After a moment, he rose to acknowledge the cheers. He clearly loved the adoration and would miss it desperately. The crowd’s love was his bulwark against all the demeaning insults he had suffered, both abroad and at home. The evening was mild and a gentle breeze ruffled thousands of Sri Lankan flags. It would take a painter to capture the scene: the particoloured crowd dense and delighted, clapping and whistling, revelling in the sheer joy of big cricket under the floodlights.
Gurusinha finally got hold of Warne in the twenty-first over. He belted a short ball through mid-on to take Sri Lanka past their hundred, then struck a steepling straight six with a cross-batted tennis-style forearm. This laconic bear of a batsman exudes lazy strength. Warne, flustered, bowled a no-ball, flat and wide. Two overs later, the two batsmen reached their fifties. Shortly after, Gurusinha lifted Bevan against the spin high to deep midwicket, where Law cupped his hands in front of his face, waited patiently for the descending ball – and dropped it. Was he too casual or too nervous? Delighted with the error, the spectators hooted and waved their Sri Lankan flags. They were beginning to believe in a Sri Lankan victory. But a voice inside me warned, ‘Remember Chandigarh, remember Calcutta.’ In the thirty-first over, Reiffel spotted Gurusinha charging down the wicket and knocked his off stump out of the ground with a full-length ball. The Nalanda Old Boy had scored a measured and invaluable 65 runs off 99 pressure-primed balls.
When Ranatunga came in the game was still to be lost or won. The Sri Lankans needed 95 runs off 19 overs, with 7 wickets in hand. Ranatunga was off the mark gliding Reiffel behind for a single. Taylor brought Warne back into the attack, to a chorus of boos and whistles, and stationed himself menacingly at slip. Watching Ranatunga, Warne and umpire David Shepherd standing together at the non-strikers’ end, I reflected that despite modern training regimes this could still be a game for rotund men. Warne’s over yielded only one run. As in the Australian innings, the boundaries, though temptingly close at hand, remained frustratingly out of reach. Warne’s second spell of three overs went for only 7 runs. The Australians were fighting back, covering the outfield and blocking scoring shots, but De Silva and Ranatunga, who between them had appeared in more than 300 one-day internationals, retained their poise. Both sides still believed they could win the match.
The two Sri Lankan veterans ran more singles that night in Lahore than they had in the whole of the rest of the tournament. De Silva, who had begun imperiously, retrenched in the middle overs. At this point, I confess I seemed to be the only person in the press box who thought Sri Lanka could lose. The Australian pressure was relentless and the batsmen seemed adrift, huffing and puffing up and down the pitch. I could not bring myself to believe that what I had so much wished to see was happening in front of my eyes. But the wisdom of the Sri Lankan captain and vice-captain became apparent in the fortieth over, when they ran four singles and struck two boundaries off Mark Waugh, unsettled by the left-hand–right-hand combination. That left 50 needed off 10 overs. Ranatunga and De Silva had calculated their assault to the decimal point.
Taylor brought back Warne for his final spell in the forty-first over. A couple of quick wickets now and the Sri Lankans could still be in trouble. De Silva chose this moment to assume command. He deftly cut the leg-spinner behind for two, drove an off-stump ball cleanly to the deep for two more, before swinging to leg for a single. In the next over, elbow high and head still, he caressed Reiffel through the covers. Then he leaned forward and turned his wrists to dispatch a ball on middle stump crisply through midwicket.
A Mexican wave circled the ground.
Warne’s final over, the forty-third of the Sri Lankan innings, was the Australians’ last chance. Enveloped by a deafening cacophony of derisive whistles, the leg-spinner wheeled in for the last time in the 1996 World Cup. De Silva pushed him gently for a single. Then Ranatunga, as if to prove his claim that Warne was an ‘overrated media hype’, danced down the pitch to drive the ball fiercely through the air. It flew through the bowler’s clammy hands and bounced into the sight screen. Annoyed, Warne unleashed a full toss, which Ranatunga, in a rare display of muscularity, pulled for six. The next ball the Sri Lankan captain slashed high towards long on for two more runs. Warne seemed unable to fathom what had happened to him: 12 runs had come off the over. The dew on the grass made the ball wet, but I suspect that was only one reason for the Australian’s loss of control. Had Ranatunga’s gamesmanship struck home? Had the Sri Lankan captain intuited that the bulky, brazen Australian was thin-skinned? Suddenly Sri Lanka needed only 17 to win with overs and wickets in hand. I began to relax.
Both Ranatunga and De Silva clipped the hitherto dominant McGrath for fours in the next over. De Silva reached his hundred with a leg glance to the boundary and raised his arms aloft. He was embraced by Ranatunga. After years of being patronized by the big cricket powers and persecuted by their home board, these two savoured their joint moment of triumph. After all the hoopla about Lara, Tendulkar and Mark Waugh, it was Aravinda De Silva who turned out to be the batsman of the tournament. De Silva’s century in Lahore was less domineering but more demanding than his effort in Calcutta; eschewing pyrotechnics, moving with dainty but decisive footsteps, he had proved himself a master of the one-day art. Now he cover-drove Reiffel to level the scores. The crowd clapped in rhythm, building in crescendo as McGrath ran in to bowl. Ranatunga ended the match by repeating the stroke with which he had got off the mark, gliding the ball with minimum effort to third man for four, a reminder of the relaxed hedonism of Sri Lankan cricket at its best. Clearly, Ranatunga remained a man who believed there was no reason to run when you could walk.
The Sri Lankan players dashed to the middle and engulfed the two batsmen. Even Gurusinha smiled, at last. The cricketers were followed by a mob of spectators, politicians, cameramen and journalists. Where were the 7,000 policemen said to be on duty? Where were the heavy-handed security officers who had kept the denizens of the general stand out of the ground till halfway through the Australian innings? As so often in this World Cup, the police were absent when they were most needed. As the floodlights burned through the thickening mist, the military band struck up a victory march. Keeping their ranks tidy, they presented the only element of order in a scene of chaos. The Sri Lankan players tried to regroup for the presentation ceremony; Benazir Bhutto, bereft of protection, made her way through the crowd to the podium. Percy ran in manic circles with his giant Sri Lankan flag. The crowd was on its feet, raining prolonged, heartfelt applause on the winners, and chanting ‘Allah illah Allah illah’ (an Islamic invocation which had recently become popular at Pakistani cricket grounds). The Muslim League loyalists packed into one of the patrons’ enclosures booed the Prime Minister as she presented the trophy to Ranatunga and the outsize man-of-the-match cheque to De Silva. The mist turned to rain and quickly soaked everyone on the field but did not hinder the impromptu dancing in the middle. In the mayhem several Sri Lankan players were knocked down and the World Cup winners’ cheque was picked from Ranatunga’s pocket. Later it was cancelled and replaced by Pilcom, who topped up the pot with an additional US$100,000; the disparity between the millions they were raking in and the relatively derisory prize money had become too embarrassing.
The 97-run match-winning stand shared by De Silva and Ranatunga was a masterpiece of cricket nous. Together they had outwitted Taylor, nullified Warne, and made the 7-wicket victory look easier than it was. In this low-scoring battle of nerves it was those notoriously hard competitors, the Australians, who had cracked first, while the Sri Lankans just kept playing cricket. Ignoring the sledging that had distracted them in the past, the Lankan middle-order batsmen kept their minds on the target. They made errors. There were alarms. But after every mishap they picked themselves up, brushed themselves off and got on with their accustomed game . . .
I had been rewarded for betting on my hopes. But the reward was not quite what I had expected. The element of personal vindication was dwarfed by an almost physical sense of sharing the satisfaction the Sri Lankan victory had given to so many people in so many places for so many reasons. As I indulged in a celebratory sundae in one of Lahore’s excellent ice-cream parlours, I studied the beaming faces of the city’s trendy, well-heeled youth. All of us, here and across the subcontinent, had supped from this World Cup. Internationalism is sometimes dismissed as an abstract, unreal creed, but I knew from experience, not least my experience during the World Cup, that it could be as intimate, profound and sustaining as any national identity. And it has this advantage: it places no restrictions on your growth. It has no limits. Later, I went to bed in a kind of post-coital buzz. My romance with subcontinental cricket had been consummated.
Critics in England derided the 1996 World Cup as inefficiently organized, excessively commercial, corrupted by politicians and besmirched by the bad behaviour of overly nationalistic host-country fans. All of this, they argued, was symptomatic of south Asian society, a place quite unfit to host an event of this kind. Within months, however, the same features disfigured the Atlanta Olympics. Clearly, whatever was wrong with the World Cup was wrong with global sport in general. As for me, I loved the World Cup. In spite of self-serving officials, vulgar profiteering and ugly zealotry, the tournament had proved a success – a giant, subcontinental festival of cricket whose impact could be seen in roadside dhabas, college hostels, bazaars, buses, trains, maidans and all the other locales where the ‘unofficial’ culture of cricket is forged. I felt privileged to have enjoyed such a wide-angle view of this epic saga. Players and journalists complained about having to travel to far-flung venues, but the sheer scale of the Cup was part of its fascination. Travelling from city to city, constantly crossing not only the borders of states but those of language, religion, culture, I was afforded countless glimpses of my fellow human beings in all their variety, as well as a ripening insight into our essential oneness. This was the deceptively modest grail at the end of my quest: that cricket can be unifier or divider, symbol of solidarity or ‘war minus the shooting’. It’s up to us.
The One-Way Critic
Upon the groaning bench he took his seat –
Sunlight and shadow on the dew-blessed grass –
He spread the Daily Moan beneath his feet,
Hitched to his eye an astigmatic glass,
Then, like a corncrake calling to an owl
That knows no answer, he began to curse,
Remarking, with an unattractive scowl,
‘The state of Cricket goes from bad to worse;
Where are the bowlers of my boyhood’s prime?
Where are the batsmen of the pristine years?
Where are the fieldsmen of the former time?’
And, as he spoke, my eyelids filled with tears;
For I, perhaps alone, knew they were dead,
Mynn an old myth, and Hambledon a name,
And it occurred to me that I had read
(In classroom) ‘All things always are the same’;
So, comfort drawing from this maxim, turned
To the myopic moaner on the seat;
A flame of rage, not pity, in me burned,
Yet I replied in accents clear and sweet –
‘There were no bowlers in your boyhood’s prime,
There were no batsmen in the pristine years,
There were no fieldsmen in that former time’ –
My voice grew firm, my eyes were dry of tears –
‘Your fathers cursed the bowlers you adored,
Your fathers damned the batsmen of your choice,
Theirs was the ONE-WAY CRITIC’S ageless voice,
And their immortal curse is yours today,
The croak which kills all airy Cricket Dryads,
Withers the light on tree and grass and spray,
The strangling fugue of senile jeremiads.’
I ceas’d; and turn’d to Larwood’s bounding run,
And Woolley’s rapier flashing in the sun.
R. C. ROBERTSON-GLASGOW
STYLES
AND
THEMES
The repugnant politics of the men who once ruled South Africa meant that that country’s cricketers never got a chance to play against sides other than the ‘white’ ones. West Indies v. South Africa, say in 1966, or India v. South Africa, five years later, would verily have been a contest for the championship of the world. What we all missed was brought home when blacks and whites happily played together for the Rest of the World sides of the early 1970s. One magic day at the Oval in the summer of 1970, Garfield Sobers and Graeme Pollock scored 100 runs in partnership. At this time they were the two best, as well as the two most graceful, batsmen in the world. Their genius prompted this essay by J. H. Fingleton, which seeks to answer the question: Why is it that left-handers are so much more attractive to watch?
The Picador Book of Cricket Page 44