Spin speaks louder than spin doctors (16 May 1999)

16 May 1999

Spin speaks louder than spin doctors

Tony Lewis

When you have 42 days of 50-over cricket played by the most successful teams in the world, who wants an opening ceremony? It is a long fuse burning from the first ball. Who believes the seventh World Cup should carry the descriptor 'carnival'? Why do we want cricket to music and in coloured clothing? Well, we have got it all, but the short cricket game is built to be exciting enough without the unnecessary rider "we have ways of making you enjoy yourselves".

The exhilarating sight on Friday was nothing more shocking than the Sri Lankan openers walking out of the Lord's pavilion into a big crowd to begin the defence of their world champions' title. No fireworks were needed. Lord's is like that.

The prelude, alas, was a distracting combination of smoke-screen activity, a sleeping sound engineer who omitted to fade up the Prime Minister's microphone and general confusion. Both England and Sri Lanka were dressed in similar blue colours. The carnival got no further than a small sector of the crowd unsportingly calling Muttiah Muralitharan for chucking in his early overs and then chanting abuse at Arjuna Ranatunga when he took part in the pavilion balcony interviews for television at the end.

The match itself took on a rather plain pattern, proving yet again that cricket is the enemy of spin doctoring. A look at World Cup history proves that. Many will remember 1987 in India and Pakistan when the host countries had reached the semi-finals. Suddenly the Calcutta final became the dream prospect: Kapil Dev versus Imran Khan. Indian newspapers were full of advertising material featuring the stars, Sunil Gavaskar and Javed Miandad, Abdul Qadir and Mohammed Azharuddin.

In fact, Australia beat Pakistan and England beat India. Right up to the final, however, the media were still full of Pakistan-Indian advertising in the press, on television and in posters. You could not have guessed that England and Australia were in town. No one mentioned the captains, Allan Border and Mike Gatting.

After the Australian victory by seven runs, there was an open-car cavalcade around Eden Gardens of former Test captains who were present on the ground. My car set off behind Peter May's, and according to my instructions, I held aloft my personal presentation, a silver salver. I was very flattered until I noticed the inscription - 'Thanks for Coming, Kapil Dev!' I guess the salver, which I handed back, is now where it was meant to be - in Kapil's trophy cabinet at home.

The excitement of '99 will build up naturally. There was a carnival spirit at Hove yesterday where India had a wonderfully vocal following, and the South Africans, though fewer in number, were also making themselves heard.

There was nothing more fascinating than the opening overs of swing and seam bowled by Shaun Pollock and Jaques Kallis to Sachin Tendulkar and Saurov Ganguly. Wonderful players proved that carnival cricket, with a small 'c', may break out at any minute but it is wiser to let the old game talk for itself in its own mischievous way as run-chases go to the wire and heroes emerge.

England's hero was Alec Stewart. His splendidly solid innings against Sri Lanka was less surprising than much of the media made out. It is true that runs lead to more runs and he had been short of them: indeed the England captain had been prompted by interviewers to talk of his poor form.

I believe he was only afflicted by a captain's ailment. So often in the build up to important matches, the captain finds himself so consumed by selection discussions, by the need to monitor the play of others, handle the media and satisfy hosts that he relegates his own performance in his mind.

It is not a conscious effort to be careless but it has happened time and again that, inwardly, the captain is saving absolute concentration for the real thing. It is not an ideal route to a big tournament because good form with the bat can be elusive. Run-scoring needs to be a habit. Stewart, however, has protested that he felt good at the crease and that his feet have been working well in the nets. I am sure that he himself was not at all surprised that everything worked well as soon as he put on blinkers.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)