Asterix and The Outsiders

Decade – ngahurutanga (ngar-who-roo-tonguer)

IT’S once more unto the pitch for the Black Caps tomorrow – one more dazzling, unlikely showing and they’ll have the Cricket World Cup.

Stomachs will already be tightening among the cricket-watching public, a group that has grown enormously these past few weeks. Many who usually don’t know their stump from their umpire, their short leg from their short ball, have been transfixed.

Others can’t bear to sit in front of it only because the watching has been too much – too close, too nerve-jangling, too exhausting. The games against Australia and South Africa were as much torment as joy, sport wrought to its highest, shrillest pitch.

Sweetly, relievingly, they both ended in big sixes and famous victories. There is no guarantee of that in tomorrow’s final, which combines a colosseum of a ground – the MCG – and the Roman army of world cricket: the endlessly professional, dominant, obnoxious Australians.

Which of course makes the Black Caps the besieged village of Gauls, to stretch a metaphor. (Brendon McCullum’s batting sure has something of the Asterix about it).

At any rate, where it was easy to feel sympathy for the South Africans, teary and prone on the green carpet of Eden Park, it probably won’t be for David Warner and Mitchell Johnson if we can reduce them to the same.

What will it take? Everything. Or at least a lot of things. Trent Boult to rip the core out of the Australian batting. The fielders to hang on to flying catches. The batsmen to be bold and smart – to run properly, to run often, to pick the moments for the big aerial shots. And of course it will take luck – the ball that falls between fielders, the LBW call that goes the right way.

New Zealand are the outsiders, as they have always been in trans-Tasman cricket. But the pundits are right to say there is something different about this bunch to those so bamboozled by Shane Warne and plundered by the likes of the Waugh brothers.

That something is part genuine talent, and part frame of mind. For once, the team seems much less likely to lose the game in its heads before the result has played out on the field.

Much of this is down to McCullum’s captaincy, which mirrors his batting. It is a philosophy of boldness, of notwondering, of personal ‘‘expression’’, as he puts it, especially if that expression takes the form of berserk attack. It removes all room for doubt.

Of course, away from the MCG, back in New Zealand, there’s room for doubters – that minority who don’t care at all about the game, who can’t stomach the fist-pumps or the byzantine rules – who call the cup ‘‘some dumb cricket tournament’’, as one scribe put it.

That’s fine. Like many minorities, this one deserves understanding and compassion. It’s true there are very strange forces of identity at work in a game that can move people to such nervous national feeling. And it’s true that the machismo can be too much.

But neither the game nor sport in general are dumb. Sport’s a lot like art, only more popular – it’s moving, and mouth-dropping, and revealing, and pointless all at once.

Tomorrow, when the game’s afoot, and the Black Caps are straining like greyhounds, let’s hope it’s all of that.