Bizarre cricket final – no wonder God wept
Opinion Richard Swainson
And then the rains came. Just after 6am on Tuesday morning, a torrent hit our louvre windows with such force I feared they would give way.
Twelve hours of almost unbroken slumber were at an end.
It was as if some imagined deity were weeping, alerting the world to his grief. Had Jehovah only just heard about the World Cup cricket result? Sky TV coverage in heaven could well be delayed by 24 hours.
I was still dealing with that peculiar outcome myself.
New Zealanders had stayed awake on Sunday in record numbers and I had been one of them. It was almost a patriotic duty. Any boss who sacked a sleepdeprived
worker for not turning up on Monday would, in the immortal words of Bob Hawke, ‘‘be a bum’’.
What’s employment next to World Cup glory, anyway?
Even given the late decision by Prime television to play the final live, to bear witness to the Lord’s spectacle was a logistical challenge.
With no Prime reception and wowser legislation limiting options on licensed premises to the gambling halls, one was reliant on the kindness of strangers. Well, not exactly. When an old acquaintance proffered an invitation to an allnight cricket watching party, it felt more like destiny. How better to enjoy history in the making than in the company of elders and betters?
The only surprise was that Hamilton academics were interested in the game in the first place. Actually, not all were. Half the guests signalled their intention to stay but a couple of hours and a portion of them were new to the intricacies of leather on willow. I was happy to attempt explanation.
What luck they weren’t there at the bitter end. My naive assertion that a ball hit over the boundary was equivalent to six runs would have been found wanting. A six is worth more than six – somehow – when the scores are tied.
But that was hours away. In the short term, the main impediment to enjoying the sporting drama was a gentleman sporting a Friedrich Nietzsche T-shirt. From his quarter, every half hour or so, came a lament that the Wimbledon’s men’s final was not being prioritised.
It was a minority view. After all, Roger Federer had won that tournament eight times over, Novak Djokovic four times. In Nietzchean terms, they already counted among the Ubermensch.
Not so the hapless English or the perpetually under-rated Black Caps, both hitherto World Cup bridesmaids.
Yet, as the match wore on, philosophy became more and more a necessity. How else to account for the vagaries of luck, human fallibility and questionable tournament rules? The LBW law, always a crap shoot, has descended into a vague amalgam of umpire subjectivity and technological speculation.
When World Cup whipping boy Martin Guptill, given out on the field, gambled with his side’s DRS review, he cut the lifeline of teammate Ross Taylor, whose innings was subsequently sawed off. Would Taylor have pushed us on to a higher, unreachable score? If Guptill had elected to walk and ball tracking indicated umpire error, he would have been equally damned.
Why not give precedence to the third umpire and get closer to an impartial, correct decision in all cases? That Guptill featured in the most controversial moment of the final was close to the final straw.
In the previous match his arm had led to glory, effectively ending the 350-match career of living legend MS Dhoni. On Monday morning, in the last over, an equally ambitious run-out attempt deflected off the bat of New Zealand-born street pugilist Ben Stokes, gifting the English a four.
If the ball had not reached the boundary, convention would have dictated that the batting side decline the runs. Anyone new to the game might reasonably question why then, given it was dumb luck, not skill, they should be counted in this instance. Moreover, as pedants have subsequently pointed out, the umpire’s decision to award a second run to the batsman, not completed until after Guptill’s heave, was technically incorrect. The ruling put Stokes again on strike, enabling him to draw level with the Black Caps’ total. ‘‘Draw level’’ is the key phase here. The English did not win the World Cup final. Nor did they score a greater number of runs than us in the tie-breaking ‘‘super over’’.
That boundary numbers decided the tournament merely reflects the influence of Twenty20 on cricket thinking, as though fours and sixes count more than runs accrued by foot.
No wonder God wept.
Richard Swainson is a Stuff columnist based in Waikato