The wow and the sheesh

By Cricinfo

Moin Khan stumped Chris Harris off a Mushtaq Ahmed wide. Jonty Rhodes, horizontal, aped the arc of an upturned smile, suspended mid-air, as he ran out Inzamam-ul-Haq by hand-delivering the ball from the outer point region to the stumps, demolishing all three, leaving the stump mic a black tangle. This was a World Cup where Pringles were more than a baked snack. Pringles - Derek (8.2- 5-8-3 v Pakistan) and Meyrick (8-4-11-4 v West Indies) - could be poisonous. Robin Smith flatbat-slugged Subroto Banerjee onto some now-extinct brown seats in front of the WACA scoreboard. Allan Donald, zinc-smeared, bowled to Geoff Marsh in Sydney on South Africa’s post-apartheid return, Marsh’s bat so behind- sync with the ball that it was like there was a tear in time, as if bowler and batsman were in different dimensions.

The real ten-tonne (and by now 36 years old) gorilla haunting addled Australian psyches was as usual Ian Botham, fresh from a pantomime season in Bournemouth, a hint of tub, who took 4 for 0 in seven deliveries with three straight balls and one that jagged back niftily to dispatch Peter Taylor lbw. At the pitch-side interviews before Pakistan played Australia in Perth, the tournament took a heady twist. Ian Chappell: “Imran, I thought you were the Lion of Lahore. What’s this [on your t-shirt]?” Imran Khan: “Well, this is what I’ve been telling Border [Allan, at the toss, who’d evidently been asking WTF re the tiger on your shirt?], that I want my team today to play like a cornered tiger.

You know, when it’s at its most dangerous.” Ian Chappell: “Yeah?” That was on March 11. Clinging tight above Imran’s pale green Pakistan trousers was a white t-shirt with a yellow tiger on it. He’d presented, in Perth, replicas of the same shirt to the 13 other Pakistan squad members, according to legspinner Mushtaq Ahmed. March was the period of Ramadan. They would gather to pray five times daily: at five, one, three, six and nine. To make the World Cup final on March 25 they had to win three games straight and bank on other teams cracking up at inopportune moments. It happened. The early afternoon of March 25 was upon them. Ian Chappell: “I see [faint smirk?] you’ve got your [suppressing a snort?] tiger on again. You want ‘em to play like cornered tigers?” Imran Khan: “Yes, that’s the motto recently, and it’s done a great job… If they play like tigers I don’t mind if they win or lose today.” The MCG was stacked high with 87,182 Melburnians. Mushtaq, wanting to make a good impression, applied gel to his hair for the first time in his life.

Waz swallowed a sleeping pill the night before. He woke at ten “refreshed… just floating”. Pakistan’s 249, batting first, was a mysterious stop-start affair but thanks to Mushy and to Waz it was ample. Bowling off six flailing steps, Mushtaq skidded a wrong’un through the chasm in Graeme Hick’s consciousness. Akram bowled Allan Lamb and Chris Lewis with consecutive late-swinging blurs - a couple of bananas up the tailpipe of the England innings. What old Imran loved most was the opportunity to enter people’s imaginations. It was he who’d soaked the team bus airwaves in a religious cassette praising Allah on the way to the ground; who’d slaked some no-ball and wide worries Waz was having by convincing him simply to bound in, be free; who’d horseshoed into Mushtaq’s head a feeling of unclouded certainty that getting Hick out was his job and his destiny.

That was at the team meeting beforehand. In that meeting, Imran pointed to his t-shirt. Later during the break between innings, the post-249 lull, he told everyone, “Don’t forget, we fight like cornered tigers…” And they hugged. It was in these slippery footholds that Imran was a great leader, the footholds between what’s real and make-believe, between cricket being a thrustingly important human endeavour and a thing of ridiculousness - slippery, and the exact same footholds in which cricket exists at all. Despite their geographical neighbourliness they were not natural co-hosts, New Zealand and Australia, the people who live in the latter seldom thinking of or visiting the former. (Can’t swear if the reverse is true: never been there.) Yet in the Cup’s lead-up a New Zealander, Greatbatch, read a book by an Australian, John Bertrand. Bertrand had skippered Australia II’s outsmarting on the high seas of Dennis Conner’s Liberty in the 1983 America’s Cup.

But Bertrand didn’t call the other boat “Liberty”, instead it was “the red boat”, and from Greatbatch alighting on thismodest psychological ploy to it becoming New Zealand cricket team policy was a small step. The beige team reached the semi-finals. Their reward was public recognition, a novelty in their lives, anytime they ventured outside the door and onto the streets of their cloudy nation. The yellow team couldn’t shake off a curious lethargy, at least half the senior members of the crushed berry team had cantankerousness or mutiny written on their faces, and meantime the rain rule was a constant irritant, transforming run chases of, say, 22 from 13 balls - as per the semi-final between the sky blue and cabbage green teams - to 21 from 1.What kind of existential meaning were we to read into this: a competition goes for weeks and weeks, everyone plays everyone else, then in the penultimate game with a cliffhanger looming and two overs to go you don’t bowl the two overs even though the floodlights are on and the rain’s stopped? It was about control, the removal of uncertainty. Let no TV watcher be made to stay up past bedtime or go to bed with a result undecided. The longing of administrators to control and bend the plaything in their command underpinned most of the mini-revolutions that embedded themselves here.

Let the TV watcher bathe in a rainbow of colours. Let the TV watcher never have to wonder what a player’s name is, or squint to see the ball. Watching the 1992 World Cup meant dragging one’s eyes through five weeks of faintly low-key fare interrupted by a scatter of minutes of near-superhuman glitter - involving Akram, Rhodes, Mushtaq, Crowe, More, others. If writing about it now has been more fun than watching it at the time, that’s no bad thing, cricket being a game that is played in the moment but lived and relived decades on. And fun, crucially, was still the crucial word. The 50-over format was in its transitional phase, no longer a creature of the village game and not yet a science, and a welcome experiment of 1992, albeit one long since discontinued, was to take big cricket matches to the bush - to Berri, Albury, Ballarat and Mackay where, in the last and most romantic instance, tickets were only available for purchase ($17 adults, $6 kids) from the bus terminal on Milton Street opposite the town swimming pool.

A local woman, Sue Compton, had suffered superficial burns putting on her car seatbelt and there was speculation, such was the Queensland humidity, that the two white balls may “swing inside out”. A pair of grandstands were erected, seating 500 apiece, while the newly created Harrup Park Hill would accommodate thousands more. The Sri Lankans travelled 15 hours by bus-planebus from Hamilton, New Zealand. Sugarcane fields put India’s captain Mohammad Azharuddin in mind of home.

Over on Milton Street, the bus-terminal manager threw open his ticket shop window at 6.30am and the Mackay Daily Mercury tipped “up to 10,000 may eventuate”, crowd-wise. In the end it was 3000-ish. The 3000-odd had reason to feel disappointed because it rained. Five hours of rain. Then the players got on the field for two deliveries. Then the rain set in for good. “I’m not ashamed to admit I cried twice today,” local cricket association president Barry Jansen said. May Barry’s last thought be this: that even on a day of nearly no cricket, it is cricket, not us, who’s in control.