ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
Australia were outclassed and outplayed in their first match of the thinking man’s Cricket World Cup overnight, going down by six wickets in Chennai.
David Warner and Steve Smith made sure the tourists would have some sort of score to defend but in the end, the Australian total was chased down in 41 overs.
It comes after New Zealand crushed the small island nation of England earlier this week and our Pakistani friends put the Dutch to the sword in Hyderabad.
Each game was a delicate balance of skill, determination and most importantly, patience.
Patience is a quality that’s becoming scarce in God’s summer game with the proliferation of T20 and other garish thought bubbles of that ilk in recent years. The One-Day international is cricket in it’s most pure form.
Your garden-variety chode, complete with his blazer and obvious coronary heart disease, would argue that the Test format is cricket in it’s base form but people have things to in the life and spending up to five days standing in a paddock doesn’t fit like the shoe it once was.
Like the shoe that was thrown at former US President George Bush, the Test format should be thrown back at the MCC and kept in the bottom of the cupboard until the holiday seasons when people might have the time to watch a full Test match or just have it on in the background like some casual.
One-Day Cricket, whether it be between Australia and India or Club South Betoota and the Jundah Jokers, is a format that captures and distills the best for everyone involved.
To watch a game of high-octane One-Day cricket that goes for almost the whole 100 overs, deep into the night and in good company, is a sporting spectacle that can’t be beaten.
Teams can recover from mistakes, mistakes can be capitalised on in this format. When something goes wrong for your team in a game of T20, it’s like something going wrong with a Boeing when it’s high up in the sky. The mistake can cascade and domino to the point where you’re back in the sheds in 45 minutes and the game’s over in 90.
When this format is inevitably cast aside by the ICC, they might as well put me in the box with it.
More to come.
