The night ICC lost
Not even when you had the intelligence of an earthworm, playing in your knickers in your childhood and smashing neighbors’ windows in the narrow lanes of Daryaganj, did you ever think that the winner of a cricket match, should be on the basis of who hit more boundaries. Never.
Not when you grew up playing club cricket.
Not when you begun appreciating the game as a spectator much after you had given up on a career in cricket.
Not when you explained the sport to a visiting friend from Turkmenistan.
Never.
The answer to when was a cricketing winner ever decided on the basis of boundaries was — never. It was like that for 48 years since the first ODI was played in 1971 and it should’ve stayed like that.
No one saw it coming and when it did, it hit us smack in the face. The winner of the ICC World Cup — an event that’s staged every four years featuring strictly the best of cricketing nations- was determined through an input variable of ‘boundaries’, in that elevated domain of sporting excellence that’s all about output variables. Up until Sunday night, in the case of cricket, that output variable used to be signified simply by ‘runs scored’.
The foundational rule of any sport, is simply two opposing factions trying to outwit each other and gain more ‘units’. These ‘units’ are goals in the case of football matches, points in case of badminton, inches in the case of pole vaulters, sets in the case of tennis and meters in the case of shot put throwers.
The irrevocable nature of sporting triumphs and disasters are measured in terms of these ‘units’. In every sport in the world, these ‘units’ have been the sole determinant of a win or loss, and that’s why what happened on Sunday night was the most brutal murder of the sanctity of sport, let alone cricket. Can you imagine a FIFA World Cup, being decided on the basis of tackles, or shots on target. Or a Grand Slam final being decided on the basis of aces served.
Toying with this concept is toying with the very foundational nature of sport. It’s like judging a musician for his listening skills and a filmmaker for the number of pages he has written. It doesn’t happen and it surely cannot happen on the biggest stage.
The very concept was as alien as it could’ve been and ICC let it hang there buried under sections and sub-sections of what would happen if it came to this. Did someone never question this?
What was even more distressing was that this specific event where a team that didn’t score more runs ended up winning a game had already happened in a World Cup before. It was in 1999, when SA tied a magnificent semi-final and lost out because they were defeated in a previous game, by the same team , Australia. While that decision too raised a few eyebrows, at least for a fan who is watching from a distance, the result was clear.
Two teams played each other twice in a span of two weeks. One game was tied and the other was won by Australia, so you could reasonably debate that the team which won the only head-to-head was given preference and the team which scored more runs went ahead.
Fair-ish. All the more reason ICC needed to step up here, to prevent this nagging feeling of ‘was it fair enough?’
What happened in the final between England and New Zealand wasn’t distasteful, not by any measure. But it was far from palatable.
Cricketers from all over the world over have spoken up about it. That it wasn’t the right way to end a match that comes once in four years. Fans have been scrambling their head as to what else could’ve been a better solution. Shared trophy? Another super over? We don’t know and it’s not our job to know.
That’s why we have administrators. ICC in this case, and someone at ICC should’ve been not lazy enough to call off the meeting with, ‘And if the Super Over gets tied, we’ll decide it on boundaries’.
Someone needed to step up there. It wasn’t these fans. It wasn’t the reporters- just someone with a little more sensitivity to ask — ‘Is that a fair way to end the World Cup?’
We will now never know if it happened.
It has hence been tough to digest this particular verdict that ended with NZ having nothing to show for their efforts of tying a game twice within the stipulated time. If ICC would’ve simply said, that the team with the higher NRR would win or retained the 1999 head-to-head rule, it would’ve still somehow made sense. Both cases in which England would’ve won, but again a WC final is to be decided on the designated day of the final, not a day when a previous game was played, which brings us once again to the specifics.
England, a team that didn’t gather more ‘units’ than NZ, was declared a winner of the biggest trophy in cricket. Of course, it was unforeseen. This hasn’t ever happened before but that doesn’t mean that the governing body of cricket had a free license to murder, the most essential rule of sports — that a winning team/sportsperson has to amass more ‘units’ than the other.
So what happens now? The fans? We’ll get over it. This isn’t our lifeline anyway. We have a sales target to meet this very month.
The Kiwis? They will take a while but well what choice do they have?
The English? Ah, they were celebrating, right?
Except every time England’s WC win is mentioned- however wrong or right- there is always going to be a faint accusation that they got lucky. Or that NZ got it worse because of a silly rule.
It’s not fair to those English players who gave it everything to win. To now always have to evade that shadow of doubt — as to whether this was the most equitable and just way for them to be crowned World Champions. Every cricketing fan after the game, no matter whosoever side you were on, was left with an inexplicably pungent taste in the mouth after that final.
Meanwhile, less than 15 kilometers away, another tantalizing game was being waged by two legends, on a tennis court. On almost every other statistic that counts, Federer was better of the two but the rules of tennis state- you have to win more games to win a match in the final set and that’s exactly what transpired. Within the rules of the game of tennis, Djokovic won more sets and the story ended there.
Fair and square.
I am a big believer in the adage that the only thing humanity will leave behind is stories and World Cup 2019 now has the most storied of stories for generations to come. Those new nations who will play cricket and the next of kith and kin of cricketers and fans will listen to the stories of WC 2019. Of Shakib’s resolve, of Rohit’s symphony, of Bumrah’s maidens and of Warner’s steely comeback and then there’ll be the story of what went down in the final.
So now, imagine the year 2059. 10 more World Cups have been dusted with and the pathetic Times of India still exists. On the day of the final, the sports page carries a list of all the World Cup winners till date. Each of the winning teams name carries an adjoining column of the margin of victory.
For 2019, that winning team reads England and against the column where every other country’s margin of victory is recorded, there’s a note about the super over and the scores. It says tied. Against it, there’s an asterisk. That asterisk has a corresponding footnote that reads: England won by virtue of more boundaries.
Wouldn’t every English fan looking back wish, that they had won by a margin that was better than a footnote? And to me, that was the saddest thing about Sunday night.
That England won a World Cup yes, but they also unwittingly, for no fault of theirs, bagged a footnote.
They didn’t deserve it. NZ didn’t deserve it.
Shoot the ICC. We don’t deserve them.
