Put it in your diary. Saturday, April 2. Whichever team parade around the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai with the World Cup, each and every nation will share in the moment. From Bridgetown to Brisbane, Christchurch to Chittagong, bonfires will be lit, fireworks will be detonated. Strangers will take to the streets, lock themselves together in passionate embrace and, despite the emotion, the words will finally find a way past that lump in the throat: “Thank God that’s over.”
A Scottish psychiatrist once stumbled upon the statistic that the suicide rate rises during World Cups. He was probably looking at football but if cricket is included, the figures need to be altered. Of all the emotions felt by those watching the past two tournaments, the urge to jump under a bus would have been pretty high up the list.
The International Cricket Council tugs the forelock to nobody in the art of solving difficult problems. When considering how to make this World Cup even less watchable than the previous two, an apparently insoluble conundrum turned out to be the equivalent of bowling a leg stump half-volley to Sachin Tendulkar. An effortless flick to the midwicket boundary, then fist-pumps, backslaps, and gin and tonics all round.
Only a particular form of genius can take an already bloated format, keep it exactly the same length and give it one inspired tweak. Namely, make absolutely sure you know the identity of the eight teams for the knockout stages before the first ball is bowled, then take a month to get there. It’s all to do with money, of course, although one day the television companies and sponsors might twig that selling your product to that bloke on the sofa is not so easy if he happens to have fallen into an irreversible coma.
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The crowds will be excitable, as always on the sub-continent, which is just as well because the matches in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh will be played on pitches seemingly prepared by an undertaker with embalming fluid. Dibbly-dobbler bowlers will be pressed into frontline rather than fill-in roles so, if the prospect of watching Paul Collingwood or Jonathan Trott wheel away in tandem to a batsman wondering whether he’d be better off with a shovel than a bat makes you dribble in anticipation, this could be the World Cup for you. As for picking the winners, they could be the side who can best keep their nerve. Not so much on the field, but on the way to the ground, where journeys will be made in vehicles sounding like the African Queen, belching fumes that could kill a miner’s canary from 100 metres, on roads with so many craters your dental fillings will pop out. Note, there is no such thing as right of way at a roundabout. Unless, that is, you happen to be a sacred cow.
Fitness is also important. Visiting teams occasionally get no closer to the Taj Mahal than the picture on their hotel lavatory wall. When England toured India in 1993, they were struck down after a Chinese restaurant meal in Madras and efforts to trace the guilty dish foundered because Mike Gatting had been among the diners. Testing all 45 courses proved too much for the health authorities.
Above all, though, the winning side will need patience. Not on the field, but off it. Trying to cash a travellers’ cheque involves getting a signed chitty from 28 separate bank clerks.
The words “no problem” will be heard 150 times a day, often just before you find you’re in Chittagong and your luggage is in Hambantota.
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“No problem.” Get used to this phrase. It’s the one you’ll hear if you pick up the phone to room service and ask for two lightly sautéed elephant tusks, the Brighton Evening Argus and the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band.
And it’s the one we heard last month when the tournament director responded to claims that half the grounds were not ready. “No problem,” he said, 48 hours before Eden Gardens, Kolkata, was ruled unfit to stage the India v England game on February 27.
And after England’s recent drubbing in Australia — what a travesty that the people behind the itinerary ensured the return home was more embarrassment than triumph — you could look at their chances and decide (in the sub-continental meaning of the phrase) “no problem”. The one-day series has left them short of confidence and fit personnel, though if one good thing came out of their 6-1 defeat, it’s that wearing the three lions brings out a passion other countries struggle to match.
One abiding memory of that series will be the sight of Trott kissing the badge on his helmet after making a century in a coloured-clothing match that raised the nation’s pulse to roughly the same rate as the chimes of Big Ben. To prove his devotion to his adopted country, he’s doubtless taken to wearing a monocle and a Noel Coward smoking jacket off the field. With this kind of patriotism, England can go all the way.