Umpire’s error kept the door open for England’s victory
For 20 years SA’s toecurling, bumclenching defeat to Australia in the 1999 World Cup semifinal has been regarded as the most tense ODI ever played. Except they didn’t lose. It was a tie. A tie which eliminated SA from the World Cup.
Now a team has gone one worse than that. New Zealand tied twice in the World Cup final against England and yet still finished second behind the hosts on an obscure and frankly absurd regulation which encapsulates how battingorientated the game is, and is becoming increasingly so.
For more than a quarter of a century tied games were universally decided in favour of the team that lost fewer wickets. But now it is deemed more successful to hit more boundaries than your opponent, so despite being bowled out for 241 in reply to New Zealand’s 241/8, England are the World Cup champions after a superover in which both teams scored 15 runs.
Make no mistake, Eoin Morgan’s England team are not unworthy champions. But never before in the history of International Cricket Council events, or any cricket tournament of stature for that matter, have a team been less deserving of the runners-up tag than the Black Caps.
Meticulous and crafty in equal measure, they eliminated India in clinical fashion and were poised to do the same to England in the final when a vicious twist of fate turned the game against them.
Defending nine runs off the final three balls of “normal time”, they were strong favourites. England’s hero, Ben Stokes, was scrambling desperately to complete a second run to keep the strike, which would have left him requiring seven from the last two balls highly unlikely, at best. But the throw towards his stumps ricocheted off his bat all the way to the boundary.
Two runs became six with the four overthrows and suddenly, from nowhere, England required just three runs from the final two balls.
As it transpired, the umpire, Sri Lankan Kumar Dharmasena, had made an appalling error. As the batsmen had not crossed for the second run when the ball reached the boundary, five runs should have been awarded and not six. More importantly, No 10 Adil Rashid would have been on strike. The mistake cost New Zealand the World Cup.
“These things happen,” said Black Caps skipper Kane Williamson. “I just don’t want to see it happen again.”
In a club game, provincial fixture or even a regular ODI, the batsmen would have declined to take the runs unwritten “gentleman’s agreement”. The scenario was acknowledged by Stokes’s apologetic gesture to the fielding side. But a World Cup final is different. Another reminder, perhaps, that every rule,
by regulation and law of the game needs to blisteringly clear, and in writing.
Cricket ranks just eighth in participation sports for 16- to 24-year-olds in New Zealand (just ahead of something called futsal) although it fares a little better in viewership numbers among the older generation. It is, of course, light years behind rugby in every measurement.
Williamson’s team were on a World Cup-winning bonus of £200,000 per man when they started the tournament, which raised an eyebrow or two in New Zealand because it represented rarely conceived riches in an impoverished game and in England because it was a mere fifth of the salary of a national contract.
England’s richest county club, Surrey, generate significantly more income per annum than the whole of New Zealand Cricket (NZC), which relies on incoming tours by the Indian national team just to survive. NZC knows it cannot compete with the money offered by half a dozen of the world’s domestic T20 leagues, so it not only allows its players to participate but facilitates their involvement.
New Zealand were the last team to arrive on English soil for the tournament after 10 of its players were allowed (encouraged) to return home for a week after the Indian Premier League. It was a week of complete rest and recovery with no official commitments.
They barely had time to regroup and prepare for the World Cup but, crucially, they made it work because they were involved in all the decision-making and consequently owned the process and the consequences.
After two successive finals and the soul-cutting pain of this defeat sorry, tie you may wonder how long the Black Caps will take to recover. Or even if they will recover. But your concern would be misplaced. Every one of these New Zealand cricketers has faced a childhood, and in some cases a lifetime, of challenges just to play cricket.
They may have fallen at the final hurdle, again, but reaching it for the second time in successive tournaments will infuse future generations with the belief that cricket is not, in fact, a minority sport. Not even secondary, never mind eighth.
Unlike New Zealand, SA has nothing to worry about when it comes to producing cricketers. There will always be an oversupply and the Kiwis are happy recipients of the overflow.
What we can learn from them, however, is how to keep them content and keep the best of them.