With about five playable hours of daylight remaining on the longest Sunday of the year, Darren Lehmann struck the ball towards the Lords Grand Stand for the boundary that gave the seventh World Cup to Australia.
This concluded a final so one-sided that it descended from anticlimax into bathos. A match that had started at 11.15, half an hour late, was all over by 4.35 because Pakistan, the most exciting side in the tournament, had gone to pieces when it mattered most.
The first World Cup final, at Lords 24 years earlier almost to the day, had lasted nearly ten hours. This one was over shortly after it started. The nature of one-day cricket is such that two evenly matched teams can easily produce a lop-sided match, simply because of the breaks of the game. It was, however, true to the uniquely perverse nature of Pakistani cricket that it should happen to them on such an occasion.
Thus the best Test team in the world became the world one-day champions, uniting the two forms of cricket into one undisputed title for the first time since West Indies lost their invincibility in the last Lords final 16 years before. Hindsight made it seem like manifest destiny. It was obvious all along, wasnt it? But it was nothing of the kind.
When Australia had gone to Old Trafford three Sundays earlier for their final group match, they were in severe danger of the earliest possible exit; two Sundays after that, during the last Super Six match, Australian journalists and officials had been making calls to check on airline seat availability, which would have been firmed up had Herschelle Gibbs not celebrated too soon and literally thrown away a catch offered by Steve Waugh.
In the semi-final four days later, as Damien Fleming prepared to bowl to Lance Klusener the player of the tournament with South Africa needing one to win, Australia were effectively goners. But that game, arguably the greatest in the history of one-day cricket, produced a final twist that no one could have foreseen or invented. Klusener and Allan Donald had a horrendous running mix-up, the match was tied, and Australia went through on net run-rate, of which, unfortunately, more later.
Australia’s improbable lurch into the final was in complete contrast to their opponents confident strut. The Pakistanis lost three successive games which did not matter, but returned to form in time to earn their place at Lords by blowing Zimbabwe and New Zealand away by huge margins. But it has been noticed before that the way to win World Cups and not just in cricket is to fiddle quietly through the early matches and peak at the end. This is a lesson South Africa, who blazed their way through the early stages of all three World Cups in the 1990s without ever reaching the final, urgently need to learn. It is, however, rather difficult to convert this observation into a strategy. Steve Waugh’s diamond-hardness, and the bowling gifts of Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, seem in retrospect like the determining factors of the 1999 World Cup. But it could so easily have been very, very different.
The overall quality of the Australian team meant that no one not even an Englishman could begrudge their right to the trophy. But Pakistan and South Africa would have been worthy winners too. The class of these three teams (one might add India’s batting as well) gave the tournament enough lustre to make the whole thing seem like a triumph. Five months later, the rugby World Cup, also held in Britain, was much nearer a flop.
Yet the success came against a background of travail almost as great as Australia’s. England’s main objective in staging the World Cup was to reinvigorate the nation’s love of the game, which had been flagging after so many years of failure by the national team. For the organisers, the worst-case scenario was that England would go out quickly.
