The England cricket team are about to play in a World Cup. The game they played against Sri Lanka, the day I met Mark Ramprakash, was part of their warm-up campaign. They have been preparing meticulously for the tournament. A year ago, England played back-to-back Ashes series just in order to clear their schedule, and for the past six months they’ve played nothing but one-day cricket. It is hoped this will help them finally break their World Cup hoodoo – England have never lifted the trophy, and it is 23 years since they last made the final.
It is generally believed that England are rubbish at one-day cricket, but that isn’t fair. Since the ‘one-day international’ was invented in the 1970s England have won half their games, which makes them, quite literally, average. They actually won the majority of their matches in the seventies and eighties; things didn’t start to go downhill until 1992, the year they lost to Pakistan in their last World Cup final.
I’ve always found it hard to know how I’m supposed to feel about one-day cricket. Having two different kinds of game played on the same stage by the same players is unusual, especially for a team sport. Rugby has sevens, but the Six Nations squad doesn’t turn out for it. Golf has fourballs and foursomes, but we only have to get our head round those every couple of years when the Ryder Cup comes along. Perhaps the closest comparison is men’s tennis, where the majority of professional games played are three-set affairs that few people outside the tennis world even notice happening. This is why Andy Murray could win all the ATP tour titles he liked in Shanghai or Cincinnati and people still thought he was a failure until he won a grand slam. If Test matches are grand slams, and the Ashes is Wimbledon, then one-dayers would be the Rotterdam Open of cricket.
So should I care if England are no good at them? From the head-holding and hand-wringing that accompanies their continued failure at the format, I must assume that the answer is yes. It is not acceptable for a true fan to keep up only with the Test score, not when short-form cricket is such a prize commodity – especially in places like India, where cricket is loved and valued more highly than anywhere else. The one-day international informs and influences the longer game, and for that reason alone a fan should accord it respect.
On the other hand, even the most dedicated cricket correspondent doesn’t expect us to care about every single encounter – there are so many one-day games in the calendar that we would soon wear ourselves out. That goes double now that Twenty20 games are also competing for our attention. The most miniature form of international competition is still, in cricket history terms, an infant. But it already has all-star leagues, top prize money and its own World Cup, so try as you may you can’t get away from its toddler’s screams.
When I started watching cricket in 1993, Twenty20 wasn’t even a twinkle in a marketing man’s eye. Home one-day series were played in traditional whites. England would start or finish the summer season with a few one-day bouts against whichever side was touring, and the winner would be handed something called the Texaco Trophy, which was clear and glass and looked like a piece of Soviet art. No one really remembered the results, although they were seen as a useful indicator of a Test side’s form. For me, the one-dayers were bookends that held the Test matches in place. If England won, I was happy. If they lost, I worried what that meant for the Test side, while trying to convince myself it meant nothing at all.
My philosophical crisis began as one-dayers started to proliferate and self-seed throughout the sporting calendar. Tournaments popped up in the middle of summer, or in between winter tours. Some took place in entirely unexpected locations: England would suddenly be playing Zimbabwe in Australia, or India in the Middle East, or South Africa in Bangladesh. There were triangular tournaments, and quadrangular tournaments, and tournaments that geometry had never even considered. The one that really lost me was the 1998 KnockOut Trophy, which involved all the major cricketing nations in a World Cup-style format but was not the World Cup. It later became known as the Champions Trophy, even though teams did not need to be a champion of anything to compete in it.
You would have thought that all the extra cricket would have made me deliriously happy – I was the kind of young convert this fast-paced fun was supposed to attract. Instead I found it baffling. One of the things I loved most about cricket was the sense of adoption it brought, the way it wrapped me up into its long, intriguing and often bonkers history. But most one-day tournaments of the nineties had no heritage at all (Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack called them ‘a bewildering variety of competitions with no legitimacy beyond the profit motive’). You never heard people reminiscing warmly about a famous seven-match series of the past, or extolling the romance of the Akai–Singer Champions Trophy (unless you found a frisson in the shotgun wedding of an electronics company and a maker of sewing machines). Mostly, the games and their results seemed to be instantly forgotten, victims of an Orwellian march of progress.
Another problem that no one wanted to acknowledge was that one-day cricket could actually be more boring than a five-day Test. Limited-over matches were designed to cater for those with shorter attention spans. Their self-contained nature was meant to satisfy the sports lover’s craving for an exciting finish. But the reality was frequently less thrilling than its inventors had imagined. When the opposition posted a good score, there was nothing more dull than watching England tramp stodgily after it, their defeat a foregone conclusion. And the spectacle was rarely any better when England batted first.
Nor did anyone but me seem to notice, or mind, that this supposedly simpler, more enticing version of the game could be off-puttingly complicated. There were ever-changing fielding restrictions that I never fully grasped (still haven’t, if I’m honest), and an impenetrable mathematical formula for parsing rain-affected matches. The Duckworth/Lewis method has always, to me, sounded like an oxidisation process for metal ore, and about as fascinating.
But the one-day game continued to expand, and as the decade went on, various players considered specialists in limited-overs cricket were brought into England’s side to try to improve results. There were batsmen with reputations for scoring quickly (not something you could accuse many England players of in those days). There were bowlers who practised the dark arts of ‘death bowling’, which stopped batsmen hitting out in the final overs of a game and included the ability to land the ball on a batsman’s toes. ‘Death bowlers’ made them sound like an elite division of the SS, but they were often about as fatal as a Bourbon biscuit.
I always felt slightly sorry for the specialists who were invited to the England camp to perform their sole trick and were then ignored for the rest of the year, and sometimes the rest of their lives. The practice increased towards the end of the decade – from 1996 to 2001, 36 different players received their first one-day call-ups, and 12 of those never got a Test cap. I understood the reasoning for the division of duties but I still thought it a shame – the way they were drafted in to fix a problem, like a plumber on an emergency call-out, and never got to feel part of the bigger picture. I’m sure I was projecting my own fears upon them, but I spent an unhealthy amount of time worrying whether men like Neil Smith, Paul Franks and Vince Wells felt like second-class citizens.
Alan Mullally had no such aura of tragedy and, of all England’s one-day players, he is the one I would most love to meet. He was not, strictly speaking, a specialist, since he played 19 Test matches for England and was intermittently called upon whenever they were short of a third seamer. (He was a left-armer, and we know how the selectors loved a leftie.) His Test career, however, was not his crowning glory. In fact, it was for some a symbol of all that was ineffective and underwhelming about English cricket in the 1990s. Which is why, if you Google Alan Mullally, the search results have titles like: ‘crap cricketers’ and ‘nearly men’ and ‘WORST FIELDING EVER’ – or ‘did you mean: Alan Mulally?’ (the latter turns out to be a very successful chief executive of Ford Motor Company).
On the other hand, he achieved something no other England player of his era got anywhere near. He was once ranked as the number-two bowler in the world at one-day cricket. The rating system that gave him the honour had been in place only two years and his tenure at the number-two spot was far briefer. But during those blissful few days he was poised between Glenn McGrath, an Australian machine with more World Cup wickets than anyone in history, and Muttiah Muralitharan, the Sri Lankan who boasts, among his many world records, an unbeaten 534 one-day wickets. Mullally, by comparison, finished with 63.
How he ended his career, a year later, still one of the world’s official top-five one-day bowlers remains one of the great mysteries of English cricket, especially since he rarely played in a series-winning side. There was nothing particularly threatening about his bowling: he was an elastic surfer dude, long arms and legs stretched into rubbery motion as he approached the crease. His bowling was designated fast-medium, and even that flattered him a little, but I liked his enthusiastic energy and I always wanted to see him do well. I persuaded myself that Mullally could become a wicket-taking strike bowler, even when his figures contradicted me then laughed in my face (match figures of 2 for 142 should never give anyone heart). I suspect this was because he always seemed a nice guy and someone who thoroughly enjoyed playing for England.
Mullally was never much profiled in the papers while he was playing – that tells you all you need to know about how his international career was valued – but the couple of interviews that I’ve read with him since his retirement reveal a very funny man. (He was once told at an eye test he had 20/20 vision. ‘I said, “Doc, have you seen me bat?”’) He comes across as someone who, perhaps, was able to take the trials of his job a little less personally than his colleagues, someone whose genial personality helped him skim over the adversity and injustices that others found so paralysing. Perhaps that was his secret. Perhaps that’s why he played for England such a surprising number of times.
For that reason alone it would be fascinating to hear his take on the England years, and I don’t anticipate any trouble getting hold of him. He doesn’t have an agent or a publicist and he sounds a pretty helpful sort – according to the Southern Daily Echo, two years ago he was helping out a tiny village team in Hampshire who couldn’t get the numbers together. I’ve soon found a phone number and an email for him. I get a generic voicemail message when I call, so I send an email, and wait for a response.
Mullally began his international career at the age of 26; the ODI itself was only one year younger, and going through an identity crisis. Arriving on the scene in the seventies, it had been a rebel, wearing different clothes, refusing to play by the usual rules, and was, depending on who you asked, the bright future of cricket or a threat to its very existence. By the mid-nineties, however, it was part of the establishment itself, which made its efforts at counterculture rather forced. The game was at an awkward stage of its evolution, caught between two eras like synth music in the eighties: it was trying very hard to be cool and edgy, and achieving exactly the opposite.
For me, the most obvious manifestations of this were the outfits. Cricket has no special relationship with fashion; there is nothing stylish about cricket whites, and anyone who thinks they are sexy probably needs their head examined (though those people have, in the past, included me). But you get used to them. The costumes commissioned for a team’s one-day outings, on the other hand, were each a fresh horror. One stripy monstrosity worn on an Australian tour was a high-concept and messy attempt to deconstruct the Union Jack (a curious idea since England play under the flag of the St George’s Cross). There were other, more childish affairs that boomed ENGLAND in cartoonish writing across their chests – and also, on one occasion, vertically up the trouser leg.
Commentators loved to call the limited-overs game ‘pyjama cricket’, but even the nightwear rails in BHS looked better than this. It said something about how desperate the costumes were that even Adam and Ben Hollioake, the two brothers who had the most bona fide sex appeal of anyone to play one-day cricket for England in the 1990s, never found a mainstream following. If they had been dressed in anything other than those hideous outfits, I’m sure that more of my girlfriends would have taken notice.
But in 1996 I was still excited at the prospect of my first World Cup. It was particularly delicious because I could now boast that England’s cricketers were better than their footballers – Graham Taylor’s players hadn’t even made it to the USA for the 1994 World Cup finals. (Two hundred teams competed for the chance to lift football’s greatest prize, compared to the Cricket World Cup’s 12, but that wasn’t going to ruin my claim.) I was annoyed when I discovered that instead of getting to spend my half-term holiday immersed in Test Match Special and setting up camp in front of Ceefax, I was going skiing with my family. The vague assurances I had won from my parents that there would be some way to get longwave radio in an Austrian Alpine chalet were never redeemed.
My faithful friend Alex had promised to save me cuttings from the newspapers while I was away, and when I got home there was a brown envelope containing all the news of the tournament so far. And the news was this: my team were in terrible shape. Picking through the reports, I felt like a minister perusing a brief on an overseas territory that was slipping towards military chaos. ‘Atherton challenged to restore order,’ said one headline; ‘England prove nothing,’ added another. The team had lost to New Zealand, and were run close by the Netherlands. Atherton had dropped himself down the batting order, where he was still scoring no runs. When England lost to South Africa, they could only scrape through to the quarter-finals as the lowest qualifying team.
I didn’t get to see any of the games until a month or two after the competition had finished. I was back at my holiday job at Cover Point, where Paul was making a highlights video of the tournament. There were hundreds of hours of unedited footage to be logged, so he sent me to a rented editing suite in St Albans, where I was required to watch some of the games, noting each boundary and wicket, and any exciting or controversial moments. I sat in a tiny grey booth surrounded by dusty Betamax tapes, clipboard in hand, scratching out timecodes and annotations longhand. ‘Brilliant boundary!’ I would write. ‘Damien Martyn smashes it through the covers for four. One of the best shots of the match – definitely worth watching!’ After a while, Paul wondered what was taking me so long and demanded to see my work. ‘You’re just supposed to write “4” or “wicket”!’ he exploded.
It was here, in my drab little cupboard, that I encountered the most exciting one-day cricket of my life. The 1996 tournament was held in India and Sri Lanka, and was the first time I had seen any subcontinental cricket at all. When the Sri Lankan pinch-hitter Sanath Jayasuriya batted against England in the quarter-final, his entire innings felt like a highlights reel. He clubbed ball after ball to the boundary, their trajectories drawing giant bell-graphs in the sky. He even landed one on the roof of the pavilion.
I knew nothing of Sri Lanka before that tournament – I couldn’t have even pointed it out on a map. But there was something positively magical about their cricket team. They were led by Arjuna Ranatunga, who looked more like a pizza chef than a professional athlete. They had players who were, quite literally, head and shoulders shorter than their opponents (causing an Australian commentator to remark at one stage: ‘That’s a big wicket for the little Sri Lankans.’). But they were deft and bold, adaptable and resourceful, and however far they fell behind in a match they just kept coming back.
I had a particular fondness for Aravinda de Silva, having been at Lord’s to see his brilliant Cup-final century against Lancashire the year before (his team, Kent, had lost, which was why I was able to be magnanimous about it). First against India, and then in the final against Australia, he rescued his team from unpromising situations with his attractive fast scoring. By the time that Ranatunga hit the World Cup-winning runs on my TV monitor and waddled down the pitch to celebrate with De Silva and their teammates, my eyes were misty with tears. This, I realised, was a kind of cricket I had never seen played before.
My parents were both good at sports – they met playing hockey – but managed to produce two daughters with no sporting aptitude whatsoever. Lacrosse, tennis, sprinting, swimming, cross-country . . . my sister and I were mediocre at them all. One holiday we took a boat up to the Scottish lochs and my dad was confident enough that one of us would be a natural at waterskiing to invest in child-size skis and wetsuits. He sat me down on the edge of a jetty and put a towrope in my hand. I loved my dad, I trusted him entirely, and his confidence in me was infectious. I had watched him gliding magically and thrillingly along behind the boat on his skis, and if he told me that I could do the same, I believed him. The unusual rubbery costume seemed in itself to give me a special anointing.
‘You won’t go too fast, will you, Dad?’
‘It’s actually easier if I go faster,’ he replied. ‘That way you’re less likely to fall over. Now just hold on to this, and when the rope runs out of slack, you’ll feel a little pull.’
I didn’t know what slack was, but I took hold of the towrope and watched him return to the boat and take the wheel. A minute or so later, I was jerked violently off the jetty and deposited face down in a freezing cold loch. Luckily the shock was kind of numbing. When Dad came back to pick me out of the water, he told my mum loudly and convincingly that I hadn’t hurt myself, and I believed that too. But I didn’t try waterskiing a second time, and, after what she’d just witnessed, my sister wouldn’t try it once.
So no, I was no sportswoman. Once I started spending most of my waking moments thinking about cricket, I guess it wasn’t so strange that I wanted to have a go at it myself. What was strange was that I was convinced I was going to be good at it. Before I had ever so much as held a cricket ball – and against all the evidence accrued in my PE classes – I pictured myself as a natural fast bowler. I don’t know why I didn’t hanker to be a batter; maybe batting just seemed too technical. I suspect, however, it was my love of theatre that drew me to bowling. Nothing else is quite as dramatic as the moment you hear the clunk of the stumps. I wanted to experience that moment of wicket-taking ecstasy, to punch the air and roar like a lion, not to inch my way methodically towards a decorous hundred.
At 15 I told a teacher that I would like to learn to play cricket, and asked if the boys’ school next door might give us some lessons. My request, assumed to be a thin attempt to intermingle with boys, was refused – but later, in the sixth form, I was told that if I could find a group of girls who were interested we would be allowed through the infamous black gates for an emphatically single-sex nets session. No one else I knew actually wanted to play cricket but a few friends agreed to come along and make up the numbers for me.
We were met by a tall man who had obviously drawn the short straw in the teachers’ lounge. He led us in some desultory stretches, then pointed at a heap of kit. My friends and I spent a good amount of time knee-deep in pads and helmets, working out how to strap ourselves in. By the time we were ready a couple of boys who had stopped to gawp at the unprecedented sight of females in their nets had been co-opted to help. Today, of course, there’s a positive evangelism about teaching girls to play cricket; urgent response teams swoop into schools at the first sniff of interest and unroll a missionary programme for potential converts. But this was not that. The laconic teacher and his sniggering aides found the scene in front of them openly amusing, and what instruction they did give was centred, notably, on the prettiest of our bunch.
Worse, I discovered that there was something I didn’t know about cricket, after all. And that was pretty much everything. Standing at a bowling crease for the first time, I couldn’t understand why the other end was so far away. I knew the length of a cricket pitch by heart, but 22 yards never looked this long on the telly. The corridor of green telescoped away from me, and far in the distance, the stumps winked back, impossibly small.
It was like being trapped in a nightmare designed by M. C. Escher. I ran up full of vim, but every time I let go of the ball, it thudded down just a few yards from my own toes. It would bounce a couple of times, then roll gently towards the feet of whoever was batting. Sometimes it came to a stop halfway there, so they had to walk over and tee it back to me. The teacher eventually came over and told me to let go of the ball earlier. After that I was lobbing it all over the place – sometimes in the vague direction of the batsman, but more often into neighbouring nets. I felt cheated. Where was the thrill? Where was the sense of power? The teacher explained that you had to start slow, but I didn’t want to. What was the fun in slow?
That was our first and last net at the boys’ school. I was the only girl who might have pushed for more, but the experience had left me low. My beloved Alex, who believed in me more than anyone of her intellect had a right to, thought I should give playing another go, so she took me along to a friendly church match her brother and her dad were playing in. It was, she promised, an entry-level game where novices were welcome. Everyone had a turn to bat; when it was mine, I put on a pair of pads that reached halfway up my thighs and were heavy as sandbags. I wondered how I was supposed to run in them. It turned out not to be a problem – I couldn’t manoeuvre the giant piece of tree in my hands, either, and I was out lbw to my first ball. The church folk generously let me try again. The next delivery hit my stumps.
So that was it, for a while. I was neither bowler nor batsman. Instead, I poured my frustrated energies on to the rounders pitch. I had enjoyed the game since the days when we lived in the countryside, and Dad used to mow the traditional diamond into the long grass on the common land outside our door. It never really counted as sport, because you were supposed to be nice to everyone, give endless second chances, and bowl the ball slowly to make it easier to hit. But, inspired by my cricketing idols, I started to hone my underarm bowling. Fast-arm-over-the-wicket might have been beyond me, but I learned to be quite skiddy when facing a kid holding a piece of rolled-up newspaper. At youth group, and later at university, I would stick my hand up and ask whatever alpha male was skippering my team if I could maybe ‘have a go at bowling?’ I would then take a hustler’s pleasure in skipping to the mark and shooting the ball at the batter’s knuckles.
I loved fielding even more. I was used to hearing the adage ‘girls can’t throw’ from Jez, Chris and Ben (to be fair, several of my girlfriends seemed intent on proving it true). But I could throw, and I could catch too. Not just the odd running catch out in the deep – the boys always loved to banish the females to the far reaches of the field where they couldn’t be a handicap – but close, reflex catches. I found it exhilarating, the jumping without thinking, the way your body seemed to know where to go before your brain did.
Knowing I had no skill as a batsman or a bowler, I decreed myself a specialist fielder. From now on, this was the role I filled in the imaginary cricket team I belonged to. Taking catches was the only thing I could do that replicated the experience of my cricketing heroes, and I luxuriated in each memory, replaying them in my head, transplanting them from the rounders field to the slips or short leg, painting in a backdrop of Old Trafford or the MCG. My favourite was the time a ball had disappeared over my head so fast and high I never even saw it – I just leapt and stuck out my arm, and was surprised as the rest of my teammates when I looked at my hand and saw a dirty white sphere stuck in it. I have no idea whether we won that game, but I do know that I ran around for the rest of the afternoon as if the fate of humanity rested on my efforts. It was probably the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like a real sportsperson.
Perhaps it’s because my own athletic career was so derisory that I have always felt so in awe of my cricketing heroes, whatever their individual shortcomings and however poor their results.
Meanwhile, I still haven’t heard from Alan Mullally. I’ve asked a former teammate for advice on where to reach him, and he’s told me that Mullally now lives in Australia. ‘We haven’t been in touch since last year,’ he says. ‘I don’t think he does email either. You know, since he’s not been well.’
I didn’t know, I say.
‘Well, he’s had a few problems.’ He doesn’t use the word, but somehow I can read it in the tone of his voice: depression. ‘I think he’s been quite open about it.’
It turns out he has. Later that morning, I find a radio interview that Mullally gave with a Hampshire radio station in 2013, just after the England batsman Jonathan Trott had left an England tour with ‘a stress-related condition’. Mullally talked about his own experiences, which were triggered by his retirement, a divorce and the loss of his father. He said he could empathise with Trott: ‘There’s days when you don’t want to get out of bed. There’s days when you don’t want to eat, you’ve no motivation, and it’s like a big dark cloud over your head . . . For me, retiring from the game [was] a big loss, from being with the lads seven days a week for your whole life.’
Mullally had always wanted to play for England. Born in Southend to an Irish dad, he was taken to Australia by his parents when he was young, so he grew up and learned his cricket in Perth. But he replanted himself in the shires, and had spent ten years on the county circuit, just another invisible servant of the bowling fraternity, when a sports reporter called him and asked how he felt about being picked for England. It was the first Mullally had heard of his Test call-up. For the next five years, he was someone England turned to whenever they felt the need for economy over excitement.
At college, Ben and I felt extremely affectionate towards him, even as we nicknamed him ‘the Dreaded Alan Mullally’. We were happy to see him firing his stuff from around the wicket and wide of off stump – sure, he was never going to take wickets from there, but at least the batsmen couldn’t reach it to hit it. It was his batting, though, that we really loved to watch. Mullally was literally the worst batsman in the world. In his 27 Test innings, he made 12 ducks. But that didn’t stop him trying – he walked to the crease in a spirit of adventure, determined to at least attempt to bat in the heroic way he pictured in his head. He was almost inevitably unsuccessful.
As I came to terms with supporting a losing team, I had begun to appreciate some of the innate comedy in England’s performances and predicaments. The team’s failings were so suffused with the surreal and the silly that, once you started to relax and take it all a bit less seriously, there was plenty to entertain you: Phil Tufnell cocking up a throw from deep in the field; Ian Salisbury trying so hard to spin the ball that he landed it on midwicket. Mullally’s batting was of the same ilk; even Mum, who couldn’t bear to be in the room for a mid-innings collapse, would ask me to call her back from the kitchen when Mullally was in.
This made it all the more impressive when his most memorable contribution in Test cricket arrived not with the ball but the bat. After a run of five ducks in seven innings, and with the game on a knife-edge, Mullally hit an unexpected 16 off an increasingly irate Glenn McGrath in an Ashes Test in Melbourne. England won it, in the end, by 12 runs, making Mullally a bona fide hero. His career taught me a valuable lesson: that it was possible to enjoy both your strengths and your weaknesses, and to discover who you are through your failures as well as your triumphs. That it was enough, sometimes, just to go and have fun.
In my university years I learned to adopt that philosophy and tried everything, regardless of how good or bad I was at it. I tried drinking Guinness (terrible). I tried dancing (better). I tried being a flirt (pretty good), being a socialite (awful) and being a domestic goddess (genuine disaster). I even tried being a footballer for a season. The only kind of football I had played before was the no-rules game at youth group, which bore the same relation to soccer as those medieval versions banned by royal proclamation in the Dark Ages for causing too many deaths. It had trained me in an aggressive, combative style, and I would no doubt have been a snappish midfielder with a nasty edge if I had ever got close enough to tackle anyone. Thankfully, my fitness levels did not allow that.
Come the summer, the women’s football team reformed as the women’s cricket team. It was a chance to redeem my aborted playing career, and with new confidence – the confidence to be terrible at stuff – I signed up to play for them. I practised bowling a tennis ball at a tree on the paddock at the bottom of the college quad; the tree’s trunk was three times wider than a set of stumps, which made it a particularly encouraging target. We only made it through one round of the inter-collegiate tournament in the end – the opposition teams had actually played cricket before – but I somehow snagged a couple of wickets with my loopy lobs, and when we rounded off the summer with an impromptu game on the paddock, I took an unforgettable hat-trick against the tree.
Of the many identities I tried out at college, lackadaisical student was probably my favourite. After all those years of swotting at school I had finally cut loose and, by the final year of college, I found I needed to cram two years’ worth of learning into a few months. It was the summer of 1999, and England were hosting the World Cup; instead of researching the teams (and ways to get tickets), I was forced to spend the last weeks of my university education in the library, catching up with the novels, plays and poetry collections that I had previously only pretended to read.
Maybe it was the stress of exam term that turned me sour, or maybe the sense that I had been cheated out of a pan-global cricket tournament taking place in my own country. Either way I decided to effect a total and utter disinterest in it. Friends who asked my opinions on the tournament got a sarcastic remark about the ‘so-called Carnival of Cricket’ (the official tagline for the tournament); their well-meaning inquiries about England’s prospects would receive a sceptical snort.
There was nothing wise or sophisticated about my cynicism. It was true that England hadn’t looked in great form before the tournament, but despite their many one-day deficiencies they had a surprisingly good record on home turf, so much so that my June copy of Wisden Cricket Monthly predicted that England would finish top of their group and make it to the semi-finals. As it happened, however, my grumpy outlook was almost immediately vindicated. The World Cup kicked off a week before my first exam, and its opening ceremony, which consisted of a few fireworks sputtering in the rain, was widely derided as the most embarrassing and underwhelming attempt at sporting pageantry ever seen.
When England beat Sri Lanka and Kenya in their first two games, I maintained my toffee-nosed distance. Alan Mullally was having a golden spell – he took a wicket in his very first over of the competition – and his parsimonious bowling style was serving him well. He was man of the match when England beat Zimbabwe and seemingly secured their passage into the next stage of the tournament. Only a defeat in their final first-round game, and Zimbabwe recording an unlikely, first-ever win against South Africa, could stop them.
For one of those events to occur was a misfortune, but both happening was sheer carelessness on England’s part. When news of the Zimbabwean upset reached their dressing-room, the team seemed utterly undone: their batting toppled to India, and when Mullally was last man out, England were humiliatingly short of a modest target. The hosts’ role in their own World Cup was over before the tournament anthem (by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics) had even been released. There were 16 matches still to play, and England would be involved in none of them; it was, without question, England’s worst World Cup performance. I felt a huge and perverse pride that I had adopted such a doomy demeanour from the start.
Four World Cups later, England are about to outdo themselves. They have already lost three of their four group games in Australia and New Zealand – even their sole win against Scotland had a wobbly moment – and those six months of intensive preparation are looking like a terrible waste of their time. I wake to increasingly dire despatches from Test Match Special. Sometimes, when I turn on the radio, I hear the cheerful tones and muted Aussie accent of Alan Mullally.
I’ve still not managed to reach Mullally for a chat. There was a brief conversation on Twitter before the tournament, but the Skype call we arranged rang out and after that he went quiet. I take the hint, eventually, and stop bothering him. I enjoy his commentary stints, though. It turns out he’s a natural: a fresh, thoughtful voice among the old-timers, dispensing wisdom in a wry, relaxed style. He doesn’t grumble his disapproval or lay into players. He seems to appreciate the positive in a team’s performances, and to remember that it is, after all, only a game.
Maybe that perspective is what’s needed. England lose to Bangladesh, and crash out before the knockout stages even begin. It is an abysmal and ignominious end to their campaign. My Twitter timeline ticks over with jokes referencing 1999; several people ask if the World Cup song will be in the shops at the end of the week. The dishonour of being England’s worst World Cup team has finally passed on, and the shibboleth that England are a terrible one-day side continues.