Look, it’s not rugby so losing Cricket World Cup final doesn’t matter to us too much . . .
Here’s the great news. Just days after that gloriously shambolic Cricket World Cup final, the good people of this great nation are already sleeping a lot easier.
England and New Zealand provided some of the best sporting drama you will see at Lord’s. Sometimes the things that go horribly awry are what make something wonderfully right.
It made the competition, a stunning Wimbledon tennis final between, you guessed it, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, seem a little tame.
Who the heck needs a nicely played single through cover point during normal time to decide a World Cup final, not when you can have players, pundits and officials diving all over the place.
We’re not drowning in waves of injustice or agony in good old New Zealand, and nor should we.
The main reason, of course, is that there is only one sport which rips the heart out of the people.
Should World Rugby commit such perceived sins against the men in black, they will be cursed for a thousand years. But in cricket, the temper is already subsiding.
For all of its problems, rugby is the sport which matters most to most New Zealanders, while cricket is — by comparison — a niche activity with a heartland centred on those few who drive an Audi through their ability to drive a hard bargain.
The ruling classes in this country love cricket, but they overestimate how deep and wide that passion goes.
The proletariat prefers sports where people run over each other rather than agonising about runs per over.
And anyway, on balance the tournament technicalities which allegedly brought New Zealand down at Lord’s actually worked in the Black Caps’ favour.
New Zealand got into the semifinals only on a technicality, an irrelevant and ridiculously complex run rate equation which saw them pip Pakistan.
The best and fairest tiebreaker system would use who-beat-who, in which case Pakistan would have pipped New Zealand for a semifinal place.
As for a fairer way to avoid a tied final in future, use the seedings.
And using those seedings, England — who also beat New Zealand in the round robin — deserved every advantage in the final.
New Zealand even got the rub of the green with the weather, avoiding a clash with a rampant Indian side and scoring an invaluable free point, which raises the question of whether reserve days should be built in.
Which leads to this: After what happened at Lord’s this is the perfect time for an ODI re-think.
The ICC should use this tournament and the final chaos to re-write specific and easy-tounderstand rules for the World Cup and one day cricket which will take it into a glorious future.
Don’t just tinker but start ground up, for a modern world.
There is so much potential in the game beyond what we have seen, but