The Joy of Six: Cricket World Cup moments

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/feb/13/joy-of-six-cricket-world-cup-moments

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1) Leverock launches into history, Port of Spain, 2007

Time was when Dwayne Leverock weighed around 300lb. His mother said it was all in his genes. They were a “big family, both sides”. But it didn’t help that she was a chef, or that her son’s flat in downtown Hamilton was above one Indian takeaway and across the street from another. His girth didn’t hinder him in his day job driving inmates from the courthouse to the prison and back, in fact sometimes it came in handy. But it wasn’t helping his sports career any. Leverock was a handy footballer – “a powerhouse striker,” as he put it – for a local team. But he was a better cricketer. He’d grown up wanting to bowl like Abdul Qadir. They’d once kicked him out of the team because he was too big, so he knuckled down and lost 50lb. It worked. His left-arm spin was coming out better than ever. He took nine wickets in the ICC Trophy in 2005, four of against them against USA in a win that put Bermuda through to the World Cup for the first time.

When he came on to bowl in the tournament warm-ups, he was sure he saw Kevin Pietersen chuckling to himself. Leverock tossed one up with a little more flight, watched it dip late, bite, break past the outside edge and fly into the keeper’s gloves. KP Pietersen st Minors b Leverock 43. He got Paul Collingwood too, and finished with 10-0-32-2. All the English papers wanted to talk about was his size. “Lard Before Wicket” was one headline. “Owzfat?” another. “Bermuda Pie-Angle” a third.

Dwayne’s mother was furious, but he laughed it all off. He was used to the jibes. Even his team-mates called him ‘Sluggo’. “I don’t get upset about that,” he said. “It’s what the Lord gave me and I use it to my advantage.”

Bermuda lost their first group match, against Sri Lanka, by 243 runs. Next up India, at Port of Spain. Bermuda won the toss and put India in. Kevin Hurdle took the first over. Just three off it. At the other end? Malachi Jones, only 17 years old, and playing his first World Cup match. Robin Uthappa was on strike. “Sluggo” was at slip, as always. He could feel something coming. “I stood there and told the wicketkeeper, Dean Minors, next to me: ‘We will get a wicket this over.’” Then he dropped into a wide crouch, ready. Jones ran in, right arm over. “Line and length,” Jones told himself, “line and length.” It came out a little short and a little wide. Uthappa thrust his bat at it.

For the next split-second, time seemed to slow down. Leverock leaned, stretched, then, seeming to defy all physics, leapt towards the ball. Uthappa snapped his head around, Jones veered towards the slips, and the commentator cried “edged!” Then Leverock was falling back to Earth. “… And taken!” Then time snapped back, and everything sped up. Leverock was on his feet, having finished a head-over-heels roll. He and Jones both set off in sprints towards one another, wild with excitement. Leverock bucked and broke the other way, away from his team-mates and across the outfield. Jones was buried beneath an almighty pile-on, and then burst into tears. “Boys!” said David Lloyd. “You still need another nine wickets!”

They didn’t get them. Bermuda lost by 257 runs, the biggest defeat in the history of ODI cricket. But Leverock had taken one of one of the greatest, and certainly most famous, catches in the history of cricket. He was voted both Bermuda’s Athlete of the Year, and Sports Personality of the Year. He still has a photo of the catch on his living room wall. “I just glance at it and think of the memories,” he says. “It feels really good.” AB

2) Gavaskar’s go-slow, Lord’s, 1975

There had been only 18 ODIs played – ever – before the first match of the 1975 World Cup. It’s no wonder a few teams were still ironing out the kinks. England, strangely enough, had little problem adapting to the format. In the opening match of the tournament, on a glorious June day and in front of (fairly) packed stands at Lord’s, the hosts rollicked along to 334 for four off their 60 overs, with Dennis Amiss gliding to a 147-ball 137 and Chris Old smashing a quick 51 from 30 balls to help things along. India, then, needed to score at a shade more than 5.5 an over. Sunil Gavaskar strode out to open the India innings … and proceeded to play out one of the more bizarre knocks in World Cup history.

Block, leave. Block, leave. The rules stated that run-rate would be the deciding factor should teams end up on the same points in the group, so there was no tactical reason to save wickets. India simply needed to score as many runs as they could. Block, leave. Block, leave. But the overs ticked by and the India fans in the crowd grew more and more restless. Block, leave. Block, leave. Two days later India’s manager, GS Ramchand, was still fuming. “It was the most disgraceful and selfish performance I have ever seen … his excuse [to me] was, the wicket was too slow to play shots but that was a stupid thing to say after England had scored 334. The entire party is upset about it. Our national pride is too important to be thrown away like this.”

Block, leave. Block, leave. Rumour swirled. Had Gavaskar been making a protest about team selection? Was he annoyed that Srinivas Venkataraghavan had been made captain? Block, leave. Block, leave. India had been bowled out for 42 the last time they had played at Lord’s, so perhaps he was just trying to avoid another humiliation? Block, leave. Block, leave. Gavaskar said nothing at the time but in his autobiography described the knock as the worst of his career. “It is something that even now I really can’t explain … I wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of playing non-cricketing shots and I just got into a mental rut after that.” Block, leave. Block, leave. “There were occasions I felt like moving away from the stumps so I would be bowled. This was the only way to get away from the mental agony from which I was suffering.” Block, leave. Block, leave.

Gavaskar carried his bat. He walked off at the end of the 60 overs on 36 not out. He had faced 174 balls. India lost by 202 runs. There would be only two heavier defeats in the remainder of the century and on both those occasions the losing team would be bowled out. India, on the other hand, finished on 132 for three. JA

3) Kallicharran’s assault on Lillee, The Oval, 1975

There have been bigger innings, quicker innings, better innings, but few so stylish, and scarcely any so brave. This was white-hot pace versus blazing bat, the most electric contest cricket has to offer. As showdowns between the two styles go, Sachin Tendulkar’s barnstorming 98 against Waqar Younis, Wasim Akram and Shoaib Akhtar in 2003 comes close. But Alvin Kallicharran’s innings against Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson and Max Walker has the edge, if only because he looked so damn good while he was at it; great mop of curly black hair blowing in the breeze, white shirt tucked in but billowing out, sleeves rolled up ready, front undone all the way to his navel. And the way he strutted out to the wicket, jaw set, just a touch of John Shaft crossing 42nd Street.

Australia had just dismantled Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Lillee took five for 34 in the first match, and in the second Thomson had sent both Sunil Wettimuny and Duleep Mendis to hospital. “Look, you weak bastard,” Thomson told Wettimuny when he first hit him, “it’s not broken, but if you’re down there the next over it will be.” Kallicharran, like the rest of Clive Lloyd’s West Indian side, was made of tougher stuff. Not that he looked it. He was hardly 5ft 5in tall, and was, as his son Rohan says, “a very jovial and likable man”. But he had a hard core, honed playing hardscrabble club cricket in Guyana’s Port Mourant.

Kallicharran also had a grudge against Australia, and Lillee in particular. It stretched back to 1972-73, when he had been singled out for some vicious sledging. “It was unheard of, the verbal aggression,” he said. “They could intimidate people, and racially. They call you ‘black so-and-so’.” He eased his way into his innings that day. It was only when Lillee came back for his second spell that the fun really started. First, a four through extra cover, then a wild cut over backward point, played with one foot in the air. A bouncer into the ribs went through midwicket. Four, four, four. Lillee was steaming now. The next was the shortest yet. It spat up towards Kallicharran’s face, till he whipped it away with a hook. A length ball then, hammered past cover. The faster Lillee bowled, the further the ball travelled.

In the next over, two more fours and a hook for six. 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 1, 4, 6, 0, 4. Thirty-five runs off 10 balls. The crowd – 25,000 strong, and most of them West Indian ex-pats – went wild. Kallicharran was eventually caught, mis-timing a pull. But the damage was done. “Once we walk out to bat, there is no rich or poor and there is no black or white,” said Kallicharran. “It is just me and you. So I was brought up in that culture of being a streetfighter – that you don’t see danger, you don’t see anxiety … if you say that you are going to walk out and feel intimidated, what are we going out there for?” AB

4) South Africa and Australia’s back-to-back classics, Headingley and Edgbaston, 1999

Perhaps only the third and fourth Ashes Tests in 1981 rival this pair as cricket’s greatest back-to-back double act. South Africa were 1999’s juggernaut – powerful with the bat, thrilling with the ball and tigerish in the field to an extent that they were changing the way the game was played. Australia, weird as this feels, were in the roles of the underdog – and it was a role that Steve Waugh and his side relished.

The first game, at Headingley, was the final match of the super six round. Australia, having already succeeded in two must-win games, had to win or they were out. And they were in trouble. Chasing South Africa’s 272 – a target set thanks to Herschelle Gibbs’s superb century – the Australians were 48 for three. Waugh strode to the crease. “Failure meant a flight home,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “and, in all likelihood, the end of my one-day career.”

What followed was the innings of his life, a granite-encrusted jewel of a knock. “No cricketer evokes more admiration than Waugh,” wrote David Hopps in his match report after the game, “no one is more renowned for their immense mental strength but, even by his own standards, the match-winning hundred which held the tournament favourites at bay was an extraordinary achievement.”

It should never have happened. On 56, Waugh clipped Lance Klusener straight to Gibbs at midwicket. Gibbs took the catch but in his haste to throw the ball up in celebration instead fumbled it to the ground. “The prize dribbled from his hands to the ground like a cracked and shamefaced egg would to the kitchen floor,” wrote Frank Keating in these pages. Waugh, who went on to make 120 and win the match, had his own words for the fielder – but not the ones you might think.

In the Edgbaston semi-final four days later the sides then came up with a sequel that was even better – a Dark Knight to Headingley’s Batman Begins. Waugh and Michael Bevan dragged Australia to 213. South Africa cruised to 53 for one, were pegged back by a brilliant Shane Warne spell of 6-4-5-3, battled to 144 for four with 10 overs remaining, and had got themselves to within 18 runs of the target with two overs and three wickets left.

In that penultimate over, Glenn McGrath removed Mark Boucher, Steve Elworthy was run out, and Paul Reiffel palmed a Klusener slog over the ropes. Nine required off the final over. One wicket remaining. Damien Fleming, the premier yorker bowler in the Australia side, steamed in. The first ball was yorker length but wide and Klusener muscled it to the cover boundary. The next was a length ball outside off, again clubbed, this time wide of long off for four more. South Africa needed a single from four balls to put themselves in their first World Cup final.

Cue the brain freeze. The third ball bobbled back past the bowler, Allan Donald wasn’t so much backing up at the non-striker’s end as backing away, but Darren Lehmann somehow missed the stumps from close range. That should have served as a warning but it wasn’t heeded. From the fourth ball Klusener dug out a straight one and set off for the run. Donald, perhaps spooked by that near-miss, didn’t. Australia were in the final.

“Never has there been a more frantic 22-yard rush of blood,” wrote Keating. “Why, oh why did he run? That such a calamity should happen to Klusener was the cruellest stroke of all. Any old tailender, sure, could be laughed off as a gormless buffoon. But Klusener is possibly the finest tailender of all time. Not only has he played the whole World Cup in the most ravishingly bold and auspicious manner but yesterday he was on the very point of putting a luminous tin lid on his team’s glorious attainments through the past month. South Africa had been planning for four years to lift this cup. No defeat can have been more bitter.” JA

5) Imran rallies Pakistan, Perth, 1992

Three weeks into the fifth World Cup, Pakistan had been battered by West Indies, beaten by South Africa and India, and bowled out for just 74 – the lowest total in their history – by England. Shambles doesn’t begin to cover it. Waqar Younis had dropped out injured and Wasim Akram was in abysmal form, having entirely lost control of his outswinger. He was so despondent that he spent the early weeks of the tournament holed up in his hotel room, watching VHS copies of Backdraft and the Naked Gun 2½ on loop. Mushtaq Ahmed was, by his own admission, “in a mess”. The batting wasn’t any better. Javed Miandad was in a funk because he’d been forced out by Imran Khan. He came back as a late replacement, which pissed off Saleem Malik, who was out of the vice-captaincy. Ijaz Ahmed seemed to have forgotten how to bat – he ended up bowling more overs than he scored runs – and young Inzamam-ul-Haq couldn’t adjust to the hard Australian pitches. No one had any idea what their best order was, and the XI changed from game to game.

Imran, meanwhile, had missed two of the first three matches because of a chronic shoulder injury. He was hardly speaking to the squad, but most of the players were so scared of him they didn’t much mind. After the South Africa match something in him snapped. “Maybe he thought that he could not be humiliated this badly, that he could not get this low in life,” said Aaqib Javed, “I don’t know where he got this feeling from, I really don’t know. But he came into the dressing room. He was wearing the T-shirt. Maybe, he just thought, let’s try one final time.”

“The T-shirt”, which had a picture of a tiger on it, was a trick he had used before, and would use again. According to Zahid Fazal, Imran kept it “stuffed away in the bottom of his kitbag, and would wear it for all our crunch matches”. But the talk he gave that day was a one-off. In his brilliant new history of Pakistani cricket, The Unquiet Ones, Osman Samiuddin writes that “likely [Imran] could not have summoned it at any other time, or as if on demand. This was a moment, a feeling that welled up inside him; it was not a talk that could be replicated, or repeated … it had to come then, both when it seemed too late and also just right.” In Samiuddin’s account, Imran spoke to each player in turn. “You,” he asked one, “is there a more talented player in the world than you? Is there a better fielder than you,” he asked another, “a better batsman than you?” He pointed to his shirt and told them to “fight like cornered tigers”.

If it had been anyone else talking, they wouldn’t have listened. And some of the senior players laughed at it – the “usual geeing-up shit” said one – but it worked. Pakistan beat Australia, and won all five of their remaining games. “All I know is that after those 15 minutes, when the match began, the way I went into the ground, I haven’t had that feeling ever before and I never had it again,” said Aaqib. “In those 15 minutes … life changed.” What Imran did, Samiuddin writes, “was transmit his self-belief to the rest of the squad, a monumental feat which doesn’t just happen … It was the cumulative effect of a decade of Imran as captain, hero and icon, distilled into one talk.” AB

6) O’Brien batters England, Bangalore, 2011

Four wickets down, 223 runs behind, and 27 overs to play. This game was already dead by the time Kevin O’Brien walked out to bat. One of his older brothers, Ger, was watching on TV back home in Sandymount. A few seconds later, when Gary Wilson was out lbw for a painful three from 14 balls, Ger noticed that Ireland’s odds had slipped out to 400-1. He thought about it for a minute, and then decided against putting a few quid on. Ireland had been utterly outplayed. England had racked up 327 – more than Ireland had ever chased, and more than anyone, in fact, had ever chased in a World Cup game.

Kev was in a bad mood. Had been all day. During the match he had been moping around the outfield while England’s top order went to town on Ireland’s attack. He didn’t get a bowl. “I don’t know why he was grumpy,” said his brother and Ireland team-mate Niall. “I think he just slept badly or something. He had misfielded a few balls, he hurt his knee.” Niall knew, as only a brother can, what that meant. “When he’s like that, he tends to kinda take the bull by the horns … and I just knew, that he had that look in his eye.” Niall knew, but it took time to dawn on everyone else, even after O’Brien had carted Mike Yardy for a couple of fours to either side of the field.

In the press box, I recall thinking: “Sweet strikes those, worth a mention at the bottom of the report.” Then O’Brien clobbered two sixes off Graeme Swann, into the stands beyond midwicket, and someone turned to me and said: “Well, this kid can play spinners all right. England should bring their quicks on.” Stuart Broad came into the attack – O’Brien cut him hard past point. “Best look up who this guy plays for. Railway Union?” On came James Anderson – O’Brien smacked a six over square leg. That was 50, and off how many? Thirty balls. It was about then I realised that, though we were hard up on deadline and our copy was due, everyone around me had stopped what they were doing, and all eyes were fixed firmly on the middle.

O’Brien stepped away to smear Tim Bresnan through cover, carted him over long-on, thrashed Anderson again, through long-off and one more time to midwicket. Eleven off one over, 14 off the next, 12 off the one after. That’s 100, off 50 balls. The fastest in World Cup history, the greatest innings of his life. “Did you think you could win it when you walked out?” we asked him afterwards. “Honestly? No. We just took a chance, and it came off.” AB