Heritage in waiting

History of the Cricket World Cup by Tony Cozier (John Wisden & Co Ltd, 192pp) £19.99

It is a sad if tolerable fact that cricket, alone among major sports not dominated and insulated by the United States, lacks a World Cup indisputably worthy of the name. As reinforced by this spiffing work, the slimmest but best of a burgeoning canon, it is a sadder and less tolerable fact that the next best thing has produced so few close encounters of the durable and pleasurable kind.

A swift scan of the hard drive shows: Gary Gilmour's Headingley swing and Alvin Kallicharran's Oval rock 'n' rolling in '75; Clive Lloyd, Collis King and Viv Richards frying and battering bowlers in the first two finals; Jonty Rhodes's gravity-challenging fielding and the wondrous simplicity of all-play-all in '92; those improbably romantic triumphs for India and Sri Lanka; that spine-strumming Australia-South Africa semi-final at Edgbaston; those perma-smiling South African volunteers last time out, flag-wavers for a new, vastly improved nation.

And that is about it, which may explain the meagre 200 pages here. Then again, World Cups, by their nature, are more prone to discord than harmony. Next year brings the ICC's ninth. If it will not match Beethoven's, it says something that most of us are praying it dances to a calypso beat. A fitting showcase for Patrick Eagar's sumptuous photography - has there ever been a finer tribute to athletic grace than his shot of Rod Marsh leaping to catch Tony Greig in the '75 semi-final? - this elegant, concise package mixes extracts from the yellow bible with a thoughtful foreword from Clive Lloyd, sound and unsound bites alike and fresh essays. While one Wisden original by Matthew Engel ("Klusener turned tail-end hitting into something close to an exact science") stands the test of time with acuity and verve, it is the reassessments that stick out.

These include Dicky Rutnagur's passionate account of India's shock success in 1983 and its unwelcome ramifications. Peter Roebuck, recalling the bloated, politically ravaged 2003 event, unearths joy in the least savoury of the eight. Stephen Thorpe's worldly reflections on the post-Packer 1979 show - including the regret that John Woodcock's prescient advocacy of a Caribbean World Cup took three decades to catch on - show him as a perceptive if neglected observer.

Osman Samiuddin's take on Pakistan's 1992 victory, heralding "only the unravelling of their fragile unity and a cantankerous, ramshackle descent into chaos", confirms that in himself and Rahul Bhattacharya Asia boasts the game's brightest young keyboard tinklers.

What irks is the grouchiness. This is partly due to that shortage of gripping material, partly because World Cups are a pain for journalists but mostly because the book too often deprives itself of hindsight's invaluable assistance. The tone is snotty in places and the reports thin, mirroring the brevity of contests but also the Old World's take on the ODI - mildly appreciative of its economic benefits, reluctant to dignify it as 'proper' cricket. And we wonder why England's expeditions have resembled Captain Bligh's trip to Tahiti.

More obviously jarring is what this outlook leads to - a shortfall in what the yellow bible habitually does best: statistics. Scorecards are all present and correct but no group tables and only two pages of records; even then, curiously, there are no charts for strike or economy rates. It will not be like that once Twenty20 rules, OK?