A Martian picks...Sri Lanka!

Full disclosure: I want India to win. There must be evolved cricket fans out there who don't let vulgar ideas like nationalism affect their pleasure in the game, but I don't know of any. Actually that's not true: I know of one: Mike Marqusee. He wrote one of the three best books ever written on the history of cricket: Anyone But England (the other two are CLR James's Beyond the Boundary and Ramachandra Guha's A Corner of a Foreign Field). Mike doesn't count: he's an American and he doesn't have a home team to back. We do.

But when our better selves take over, when we remember first things, like the joy of accidentally middling the ball and hearing it 'thunk' off the sweet spot of the bat, it's sometimes fun to imagine who you'd want to win the Cup if you were a neutral, like Marqusee, or a Martian.

When I'm being extra-terrestrial, I want Sri Lanka to win.

The Sri Lankan team makes me smile. Do I think it's going to win the World Cup? I've no idea. The function of pre-World Cup journalism isn't astrology: it's job is to find believable reasons for enthusiasm and prejudice.

Sri Lanka has the most interesting team in the Cup. They open with Sanath Jayasuriya, the arch-heretic of modern cricket: he breaks every rule in the book and yet he is one of the most effective ODI allrounders in contemporary cricket. He plays nearly every single shot with the bat angled and the bat face open, and he lifts the ball more often than he plays it along the ground and despite this he's probably won more matches for Sri Lanka off his own bat than any one else on that team. Upul Tharanga is a good partner for him: he had a wonderful tour of England and hit two centuries in the Champions Trophy, so if Jayasuriya gives us a half-decent swansong, Sri Lanka's likely to be off to some great starts.

The captain, Mahela Jayawardene and his predecessor, Marvan Atapattu are better at the longer game but they've adapted orthodoxy to the needs of one-day cricket and when they're in form, they make reliability seem a graceful and attractive quality.

Nationalism aside, Kumar Sangakkara is my favourite cricketer. His record in Tests is better than his ODI record, but an average of 36 and a strike rate of 75 is very respectable for a top-order player who also keeps wicket. But that isn't why I like him. Like a good desi I'm a sucker for anyone who talks a good game and I've never heard a cricketer speak as lucidly and impressively as he does. There's a two part interview on Cricinfo with Sanjay Manjrekar where he's so sharp and so fluent that he makes Mike Brearley seem inarticulate. And unlike Brearley, this guy can bat—he averages over fifty as a Test batsman—and keep wickets.

The one thing this Sri Lankan team seems to lack is an intimidating batsman who comes in after the openers and can, if required, take the game away from the opposition with pure aggression. Aravinda de Silva came to the wicket at Eden Gardens during the semi-finals of the 1996 World Cup, after Sri Lanka had lost a couple of early wickets, and destroyed us. He just decided that the bowlers had to go…and they went. Sangakkara might become that sort of batsman in time, but he isn't there yet. Australia is a great team because Ricky Ponting can walk in after an early wicket, watch a couple more fall and still go for the bowling as if it were business as usual. (The Indian team is particularly bad at dealing with the loss of early wickets: despite the enormous experience and talent in the batting line-up, its instinct is to hunker down like a besieged garrison.)

The Sri Lankan bowling is a constant delight. Chaminda Vaas, little more than medium now, is a canny old fox and his batting gets better all the time. Dilhara Fernando reminds me of the tall West Indian quicks of yore, right down to the bounce he gets off the wicket and the stress fractures. Facing Fernando and Lasith Malinga operating in tandem must be weirdly disorienting: one minute the ball's steepling down at you from eight feet; the next second your radar's trying to home in on a low flying missile slung at you from under five.

After his destruction of the West Indies in the Champions Trophy, Farveez Maharoof seems a real prospect though he'll have to compete with Dilhara for a place in the eleven. And then, of course, we have the great man himself, Muttiah Muralitharan. Sri Lanka missed him in their tour of India before the World Cup, though to be fair to the Indians, they're such good players of spin that Murali's never really been a mortal threat. But the man has more than four hundred wickets at twenty-three runs apiece at an economy-rate under four runs an over. If you were picking the bowling attack for a World IX you'd pencil him in right after Glenn McGrath.

So speaking strictly as an alien, I want to see an Australia-Sri Lanka final. And should the Sri Lankans win, it'll be nice if they don't take the trophy off to be blessed by the Buddhist clergy like they did the last time they were champions. Murali, Farveez, Atapattu, Malinga and the rest of the team do their best for Sri Lanka, not for some majoritarian Sinhala Buddhist state. Nationalisms that exalt a dominant faith dishonour the collective effort that makes team games special. They should have no place in cricket.