Three straws in the wind

Yesterday’s match in Sydney was a small step for England but a great (rain-assisted) leap for cricketing mankind. If this England team after the Ashes whitewash can beat Australia three times in a row, there’s hope for the rest of us. The World Cup suddenly looks like a contest instead of a prolonged green-and-gold victory lap.

From an Indian point of view, the difference between this Australian team and earlier ones is not so much Shane Warne’s absence as Glenn McGrath’s decline. Indian batsmen never bought into Warne’s mystique but McGrath was a different matter. No Indian ever sorted out McGrath. A decline, of course, is a relative thing: McGrath has lived alone on Everest so long that even a slide off the summit still leaves him at an altitude most bowlers never reach. Yesterday he took 2 for 41 off ten overs, which Zaheer Khan and Munaf Patel would gladly settle for, but he went for fifty runs in the first final against England without a wicket and he’d gone for fifty in the last league match against England. Five runs an over isn’t expensive in the context of contemporary one-day cricket, but it isn’t McGrathian. Australia remain favourites for the Cup but the odds on them winning have lengthened and it’s no longer a one horse race.

If this was the lesson of the England-Australia encounter, the other two matches provided a pointer or two about who might challenge Australia down the home straight. The South Africans are clearly the main contenders; the ICC rankings have that right. They killed India four times in a row and what they did to Pakistan yesterday was cruel. They’re a great fielding unit and they bat deep which helps but I can’t help thinking that their bowling is so bustlingly similar that anytime Shaun Pollock has an off day, they’re likely to get slaughtered. On the other hand, if there’s one team that’s on its knees giving thanks for Warne’s retirement, it’s this lot, so that’s another thing they have going for them.

But if I was a betting man I’d put my money on Sri Lanka. To beat India at home without Chaminda Vaas and Muttiah Muralitharan (ie nine-tenths of their bowling attack) after the game seemed lost, needed extraordinary poise and nerve and this Sri Lankan team has both. They fielded like demons and in Kumar Sangakkara they have one of the cleverest men in cricket, a modern-day Mike Brearley with a difference: this man can bat. So can Mahela Jayawardene and Marvan Atapattu and I have a happy feeling that Sanath Jayasuriya, that Martin Luther of modern cricket who offends against orthodoxy every time he swings his angled scythe, is saving himself up for one last spasm of berserker violence on the world stage. And Lasith Malinga is so weird he’s wonderful: Sri Lanka is a kind of cricketing Galapagos, breeding exotic bowling actions in its island isolation.

Pakistan are number three in the ICC’s rankings and anyone with eyes knows that as individuals they’re so prodigiously gifted that eleven of them on a good day could win anything. But, as with India (only more so) the Pakistani whole is often considerably less than the sum of its constituent parts. Yesterday they played like they were collectively in the depressive phase of a bi-polar disorder. They have the remarkable Mohammad Asif, all round depth, and a great middle order, so they’re contenders but after yesterday’s performance you’d have to be a patriot or a clairvoyant to bet on them.

From the Indian point of view, yesterday’s game followed a recent pattern. Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar did moderately well, Rahul Dravid failed, Mahendra Singh Dhoni contributed but not decisively and the tail collapsed. The worrying thing about the game was that everyone apart from Anil Kumble and Dravid played reasonably well and we still lost.

The seamers did as well as anyone could expect and the four selected for the West Indies are no surprise: they pick themselves. Irfan Pathan’s passage was booked on a wish and a prayer. Dinesh Karthik’s selection in the World Cup 15 is understandable because he is insurance in case Dhoni is injured. That Robin Uthappa, on the strength of seven ODIs and two fifties, made the cut ahead of, say, VVS Laxman (who will now never play a World Cup match) is hard to credit. He has been chosen, I suspect, to carry the standard of youth, a responsibility once borne by RP Singh and VRV Singh and Suresh Raina. Greg Chappell, Dravid and the selectors have so fetishized youthfulness that they couldn’t, without embarrassing themselves, have picked a batting line-up that, with the exception of Virender Sehwag, was Made in the Nineties. For India’s sake and his, I hope Uthappa does well, otherwise he’ll be the latest sacrifice at the gory altar of New Blood. I can’t see a neutral punter backing us to win. On the other hand the odds on an Indian win in ’83 were 60 to one and I’m not a neutral punter. We can win this one…