If you don’t care about cricket, you won’t care about England having just won the World Cup. If you do care about cricket, you’ll not be paying any attention to me, here. But, in the years to come, I will. I need to have some links to this game, here, to wallow in, in the years to come.
The strange thing was, for two thirds of the game, NZ were grinding their way to a dreary win, by about 241 to, say, England all out 190. England, making a mess of chasing 242, were 90 for 4 and looking doomed. Worse, a generation of small boys watching it on free-to-air telly with their cricket mad dads would have been wondering what the hell all the fuss was about. Then the sun came out, and Jos Buttler came out to join Ben Stokes, and it then became a different game.
For once, that idiot cliché about cricket being the winner is true. Because this game was shown free on the telly, and because of how it got so crazily close at the end, who knows how many thousands of little kids will have got all excited about Stokes, Buttler, and the rest of them?
For the benefit of those learning about this game for the first time, a day late, England won by winning the cricket equivalent of a penalty shoot-out, after they had been all out for 241, chasing 242 to win. So, a tie. Then, to settle it and to work out who got the trophy, England got 15 in the “super-over” of six halls bowled by one of the opposition bowlers. NZ replied with 15, in their super-over. But England won it because they’d hit more boundaries throughout the day – 26-17, my telly has just told me – than New Zealand did.
Holy, as the man at Cricinfo said in amongst all this mayhem, Moly.
Will their be another patriotic orgy in Trafalgar Square to celebrate this? Along the lines of this:
(Those were photos I photoed in Trafalgar Square on September 13th 2005, in honour of another big England cricket win.) I really don’t see why not.
Also today, that Federer guy was involved in another rather close game, of tennis.
Did you know that these two games ended within minutes of one another? You do now.
I boarded a plane yesterday evening. At that point the tennis was about half a game from going into the final tie break and the cricket was in the last over. When the plane took off, the tennis was just over and the cricket was halfway through the super over. I then had to wait two hours to find out the result. That was annoying, but I fear it was also very me.
The requirement to choose which of three different sports to view that Sunday made me conclude that my preference to sports was: 1. Cricket, 2. Tennis, 3. Motor Racing. What was more of a surprise was my wife abandoning the final set slog in the tennis (“getting tedious”) to watch the climax of the cricket. Two new converts here.