44 LISTENER JUNE 8 2019
THIS LIFE
G
ET
TY
IM
AG
ES
Lies, damned
lies and ODIs
New Zealand looks good
on paper as it takes its place
in the 10-nation Cricket
World Cup field.
by Paul Thomas
SPORT
Flying high: Trent
Boult is the second-
top-ranked ODI
bowler and three
Kiwi batters are in
the ODI top 12.cricket back then was just an
abbreviated version of test cricket.
There were no fielding restric-
tions, wides had to be out of the
batsman’s reach, as opposed to a
couple of centimetres outside leg
stump, the players wore white
and the ball was red. And thereT
he 12th men’s Cricket World Cup, now
under way in England and Wales, will
bear little resemblance to the inaugural
tournament in 1975.
In the intervening years, limited-
overs cricket has gone from being a
gimmick, a bit of “hit and giggle” for
the non-purist who lacked the knowledge and
attention span to appreciate test cricket, to the tail
that wags the dog.
And cricket itself has gone from being a rather
quaint pursuit undertaken in scattered pockets
of the old British Empire at a leisurely pace that
harked back to the amateur era to a year-round,
increasingly global, professionalised and athletic
game comfortably positioned at the sport/enter-
tainment nexus created by pay television.
The 1975 tournament consisted of 15 games
shoehorned into a fortnight. The peripheral role
and influence of television enabled the organisers
to stage four games simultaneously, as opposed to
staggering them to maximise income for the partici-
pants and “product” for the broadcasters. This year’s
competition has 48 games and ends in mid-July.
There were eight teams in 1975: the traditional
test-playing nations minus South Africa, who
were banned; associate nation Sri Lanka; and a
composite East Africa team. This year, there are 10
participants, reduced from 14 in 2015 to create a
format in which every game counts. However, the
fact that Sri Lanka won a World Cup 21 years after
just making up the numbers would seem to add
weight to the argument that you can’t expect to
grow a game internationally unless you give the
minnows the opportunity to compete on the big
stage.
In most respects, one-day international (ODI)England’s Jos Buttler, far left, and India’s
Hardik Pandya.