A shakedown for cricket's la-di-dah community

They didn't mean it. Really, the lovely staff at the ITC Royal Gardenia didn't mean to be mean. They were just going about their hospitality routines the way they are planned. When teams arrive there, they get a traditional welcome: garlands, flowers, the thunderous ghatam - a traditional south Indian percussion instrument made of a clay pot. When a team leaves, a live band (featuring a violin, saxophone and guitar) plays tunes as they walk through a guard of honour, with the staff holding up bats on either side of their red carpet. As England left Bangalore on Thursday, the band began to play ‘Moondance’. The song belongs to Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. Now he may be from Belfast, in Northern Ireland, but as Andrew Strauss' team walked past, in a shower of rose petals and bad memories, it was always going to be an Irish song.

The morning after what Van the Man would be happy to call ‘a marvellous night for a moondance’, the Irish bid England goodbye, not like the hotel staff had done, but by elbowing them off centre-stage. The players were being woken up by phone calls and messages, hauled out of swimming pools and bracing themselves for a barrage of predictable questions. But like Trent Johnston told his not-out partner John (“Mooners”) Mooney as they walked off the Chinnaswamy ground in riotous celebration, this was what they played for. Johnston said: “This is what we train for, this is what it is all about – to be in that moment.” He was referring to the victory over England, but at some point of the morning, as Ireland’s cricketers sat around tables, drinking beer and coffee, all its other consequences also came into play.

England gathered in small groups, ready to leave, with their gargantuan support staff. Ian Bell sat unnoticed over his brunch while monster-century man Kevin O'Brien wandered around wearing a freedom and an accessibility that can only belong to a player from a team finding its feet and happy to show off its new set of shoes. It wasn't merely about O'Brien's pink-streaked blond hair or the lack of self-consciousness with which he wore an unbranded T-shirt and marvellouslly patterned bermuda shorts with large grey, blue and fuschia flowers. It was about how the man of the morning shared himself with everyone, and the simplicity with which he told his story. Chasing 328 on Wednesday, Ireland, O'Brien said with a little poetry, “didn't want to die wondering.” After O’Brien was out, Johnson took a slow, measured, deep-breath of a walk onto the crease, all the time speaking to himself. “I was telling myself, what you need to do is not to try and hit a ball for six. Just try and get us over the line.”

Ireland did go over the line and must now find a way to maximise the distance it has made them cover. They do believe they are benevolently being watched over by someone on their side. Two days after their main sponsor RSA (Royal & Sun Alliance, an insurance company) had first signed the contract with Irish cricket, the Barings bank collapse led to economic meltdown in Britain and Ireland. But as the contract had been signed, it had held up. Now the sponsors must look at Wednesday's result and contemplate the next step. Just over 12 hours after the victory, there was a brainstorming session in the hotel coffee shop among the sponsors and senior management of the Irish Cricket Union. The board officials, the sponsors, the players mingled with each other, some sitting at a table and talking. Older men made phone calls and shook hands to publicise the case for younger ones. It was corporate vocabulary's most overused word, 'stakeholder', come to life in a way it may really have meant to be, before being seized by spin meisters.

The day after they beat England, Ireland didn't need spin meisters, because its cricketers had a story to tell and could do so without minders minding bloopers. The most team manager Barry Chambers did, in the name of vigilance, was to carry two T-shirts over his arm, in case there were any TV interviews to be done and the players shirts were found too inappropriate. O'Brien talked about the team's involvement in the Irish Cancer Society's 'shave & dye' campaign – the reason for his pink hair and the captain William Porterfield’s purple streaks – and said with pride that the cricketers had raised 2000 Euros for the charity last year. He didn't think of the size of the number, just at what cricket had managed to do in Ireland. Not one of Ireland's top four sports, its players far from high earners, cricket had somehow managed to reach out to an audience willing to donate to charity at their request.

Wednesday's match did more than manically shuffle Group B in which six out of seven teams will have to scrap for a place in the last eight. Cricket is now full of far too much spin, far too much 'imaging' and far too many Twittering millionaires who wouldn't colour their coiffure for fear of denting their “branding”. What cricket's la-di-dah community have just received at the hands of the Irish, even if for a short while, is a real shakedown.