44 YEARS OF PAIN
ENGLAND CRICKETERS RELIVE THEIR WORLD CUP WOES
1975 DENNIS AMISS
England won Group A after beating India, New Zealand and East Africa, but lost to Australia in the semi-finals by four wickets at Headingley. The tournament started with all eight teams gathering at Buckingham Palace for a reception. We thought we had a really good chance on home soil.
County cricket had been in the doldrums in the 60s and the oneday game had given it an injection. It arguably made us the most experienced one-day side, and we were used to the conditions, but West Indies and Australia were the two strongest sides and they ended up contesting the final.
We played really well in the first match versus India, on a glorious day at Lord’s. Sunil Gavaskar came out intent on getting some batting practice, clearly thinking that chasing down our score of 334 for four was impossible. We couldn’t believe it.
We came unstuck in the semis against Australia. The ball swung and deviated off the pitch at headingley and we were bowled out for 93. The Aussies were 39 for six in reply and Tony Greig — who I’d never seen drop a catch — put down Gary Gilmour.
Gilmour was a good one- day cricketer, someone who proved a handful with the ball when it moved about, and a performance of six wickets and top- scoring from No 8 made the man of the match choice easy enough.
We enjoyed the ride. It was a shame it ended in Leeds.
1979 GRAHAM GOOCH
England won Group A, beating Australia, Canada and Pakistan. They beat New Zealand in the semis before losing to West Indies by 92 runs in the Lord’s final. IT WAS still all very new and we were playing 60 overs then with no fielding restrictions. It was at a more leisurely pace, but it was a great competition.
We had the same team as our Test one and whereas you try to restrict the score today by taking wickets, in those days it was all about economy and accuracy. The big difference is in scoring rates and when I came in at No 4 in the final, we needed eight an over.
I won’t say anything about the opening stand between Mike Brearley (64 from 130 balls) and Geoff Boycott (57 from 105 balls) because that’s well documented, but while eights might not seem steep now it was near impossible then, especially against one of the most effective attacks there’s ever been with pretty much every fielder on the boundary. That was beyond us but we should have won the 1987 and 1992 tournaments!
1983 VIC MARKS
England won Group A but lost in the semi-finals to India at Old Trafford. TheSe days it seems strange but I was the only spinner in the squad. It was an entirely different game in that you could run up, bowl to a 6-3 onside field and if you got your line right on middle and leg, an astonishing number of batsmen would hit the ball straight to one of the six fielders. The structure of the tournament was bizarre in that you played the other teams in your group twice and we had a favourable draw alongside New Zealand, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
We had a settled team and won five out of six before messing up a semi-final we went into as favourites. It was a sluggish Old Trafford pitch and we were bowled out for 213 in a full 60 overs. India got home with half a dozen overs to spare in what must have been a horrible match to watch.
The result, and the subsequent shock victory for India over West Indies in the final, transformed the game worldwide. India had not been interested in one-day cricket until this point. Their home Tests would sell out but white- ball matches were sniffed at.
Suddenly, schedules changed and ODIs on the subcontinent were played to full grounds.
1987 MIKE GATTING
England finished second in Group B and beat India in the semi-finals before losing by seven runs to Australia in the final in Kolkata. BILL AThey and I were going along nicely in the final until I played a reverse sweep to Allan Border and got out. That, sadly, was the end for us. There was some comment about the way I got out but it was a shot I’d played through the tournament, and had a lot of success with it in the semi. It was just one of those things.
It’s a bad shot if you get out to it but not if you hit it for four. That’s life. But it was so disappointing because we’d played so well and then to lose in the final, especially to Australia, was tough to take.
A seven-run defeat sounds close but we weren’t at our best that day in Kolkata and the Aussies played well. We’d had some tough matches to get there, not least the semi-final against India, and we adapted very well. It just wasn’t to be in the final.
1992 CHRIS LEWIS
A round-robin format saw all nine teams play each other once. England finished second and beat South Africa in the semi-finals but lost by 22 runs against Pakistan in the final in Melbourne. A quArTer of a century on allows you to look back with less emotion and accept it was an unbelievable passage of bowling by Wasim Akram that decided the final. We thought Pakistan would struggle to get towards 200, so when they set us 250 it gave them a psychological boost. We went into bat a bit deflated, having let them off the hook.
We started poorly against good swing bowling, but Neil Fairbrother and Allan Lamb got some momentum going before, in the space of two balls, we were back to square one again. It’s hard to stop that delivery from Akram going through my mind. I saw it replayed on TV the other day and if I hadn’t tried to play it, it would have missed the stumps.
It was so disappointing to get so far and fall at the final hurdle. To see Pakistan lift the trophy was very painful.
The current england team is the best since us. We had so many good combinations. I remember looking around the dressing room thinking ‘these guys are all guns’. It’s a healthy place to be to have so much confidence in your team.
1996 PHILLIP DeFREITAS
England narrowly qualified from Group B, beating the United Arab Emirates and Holland, but losing to South Africa, New Zealand and Pakistan, who co-hosted with India. They then lost in the quarter-finals against Sri Lanka. IT WAS poor preparation and the wrong team. I had been part of the england sides who reached the previous two finals, but for this one I don’t honestly think we’d picked a proper one-day team.
The game had changed and Sri Lanka won the tournament by going hard in the power play, whereas we were behind on the best way to go. We’d gone to the subcontinent with one spinner, Neil Smith, and loads of seamers. The day before our quarter-final against Sri Lanka in Faisalabad on a very flat pitch, I was asked to practise cutters and off-spin.
That was basically my preparation for our big match and I had to go out and bowl in a completely different way to normal. Mind you,
even if I’d bowled the way I usually did, Sanath Jayasuriya would probably have still smashed it. It was all wrong. We were behind the eight-ball and miles off what Sri Lanka were doing.
In the previous two tournaments we had much better one- day cricketers. I always joke that Mike Gatting cost me an OBE in 1987 and the 1992 team were England’s best until the current side. Those finals both hurt, but at least we were a very good side. In 1996 we just got everything wrong.
1999 ALEC STEWART
England failed to get out of the group in their home tournament. They were pipped by Zimbabwe, who had a better net run rate. ThE whole thing was a shambles from start to finish. We didn’t play well enough, but there were a lot of things that didn’t help. We weren’t allowed to pick the squad we wanted — Bumble (David Lloyd) and I wanted Chris Lewis but were told in no uncertain terms we couldn’t have him — and there was a contract dispute.
Simon Pack of the TCCB board came to see me the afternoon before the first Ashes Test in Brisbane the previous winter to talk about World Cup contracts. It was hardly perfect timing.
The players weren’t being greedy — the board ended up offering us the same money we’d get for a three-match Texaco Trophy series. All we were asking was to be treated fairly and receive incentives for doing well, so we wouldn’t have got the extra money anyway, but we were treated shabbily. It was a them-and-us type thing.
You should never take off-field things on to it but it didn’t help when we wanted to concentrate on cricket. The one good thing is that the PCA Team England alliance was formed on the back of that.
There were other factors. We prepared for a home tournament in the desert in Sharjah. We wanted to be based in Leicester and ended up at Canterbury. Every time we asked for anything the answer was no. I did expect to lose the captaincy after that but it was still a little harsh on me. Two good people, Nasser hussain and Duncan Fletcher, came in and that’s when England’s renaissance started, so it all worked out for the best.
2003 JAMES ANDERSON
England failed to progress from the group stages in South Africa and Zimbabwe. They lost three of six games with wins against Holland, Namibia and Pakistan. TAkING four wickets in the win against Pakistan in Cape Town sticks out as one of my most memorable moments. It was the first England game my entire family had come to watch and those were the days when the kookaburra ball was a bowler’s friend.
I bowled my 10 overs straight through. It was under lights, humid and the perfect night for swing. Ultimately, not going to Zimbabwe cost us (England pulled out of that fixture due to concerns over player safety amid unrest in the country). We didn’t get the points and had meeting after meeting with player representatives, the ECB and the ICC, which took a lot out of people.
When you’re at a World Cup you just want to focus on the cricket, but we couldn’t. We still had the chance to go through with victory over Australia, but unfortunately Andy Bichel ploughed me on to the scoreboard and out we went.
I was gutted, almost in tears, thinking I’d cost us our place but Nasser hussain came over, put his arm around me and told me: ‘There was a reason I gave you that over.’ For a 20-year-old, that made the best of a bad situation.
2007 PAUL NIXON
England finished second in their group in the Caribbean but couldn’t get through the Super 8 stage, losing to Australia, South Africa and Sri Lanka. WE came into the tournament off the back of unexpected success in the tri-series in Australia and were in a good place. We won the final against Australia and I went to the Caribbean — a dream come true.
I was 36, playing in the World Cup in the West Indies. People remember the ‘ Fredalo’ incident in St Lucia but that wasn’t a distraction. Players put that sort of thing behind them and move on. Duncan Fletcher just called us all in and told us he was disappointed and not to let it happen again. It wasn’t the reason we didn’t go far in the tournament. Far from it. It galvanised us.
I was quite consistent with the bat and behind the stumps, but we didn’t get enough top-order runs. We were a close-knit bunch. Michael Vaughan believed in me while Duncan was a top bloke, and if he’d stayed I might have played for England for another 18 months.
2011 JONATHAN TROTT
England progressed from the group stage but lost in the quarter-finals by 10 wickets against Sri Lanka in Colombo. ThE tournament came off the back of a winter in Australia, so the guys were weary and we were not flying high compared to the current side, even though we’d played decent one-day cricket.
We’d left home on October 28 and I got home on April 1. The old ECB chairman Giles Clarke told me this was why we ended up playing back- to-back Ashes a couple of years later, to avoid a repeat of the Ashes and World Cup coming close together. But what’s happening this summer?
Our games in 2011 were quite exciting one way or another and it was a real mixed bag, but we were well beaten by Sri Lanka.
I got a few runs but never got going in the tournament. It’s one of the few regrets I’ve got from my career. There was a suggestion we’d been told by our analyst that 229 was a good score in that quarter-final in Colombo but I don’t remember it that way.
I tried to increase the scoring rate towards the end of our innings but I just couldn’t get going in the heat and humidity. And they knocked it off without loss!
The other memory I have is taking my cap off for the anthems before the game and almost getting sunstroke because the Sri Lankan anthem was so long!
2015 IAN BELL
England failed to make it out of the group stage in Australia and New Zealand after winning two of six matches — against Scotland and Afghanistan. WE were average in every World Cup I went to, not just from a performance point of view, but in preparation. Last-minute changes were a feature of all three.
Ahead of the last one, they replaced Alastair Cook as captain with Eoin Morgan just months before. how do you do something like that? That kind of move needs to be made two years in advance.
Was everyone clear on their roles? Not really. I generally felt good as we headed into the tournament, scoring a hundred in a tri- series defeat by Australia in hobart, but we never got our A game out.
We never got the shackles off. We scored more than 300 in one match and Sri Lanka knocked it off comfortably. We weren’t decisive against Bangladesh.
We had Alex hales there the whole time and he only played the last game. In World Cups, you can’t be cautious. You have to be brave. If you’re going to lose, at least throw some punches. COMPILED by Paul Newman and Richard Gibson