Published: Feb 21, 2011, 11:31 AM (IST)
Edited: Jul 02, 2014, 08:18 PM (IST)
By Madan Mohan
In an article published a few days ago, the well known cricket writer Peter Roebuck suggested that the World Cup had peaked in 1996 because with that, Sri Lanka too was liberated through their cricket and there was no theme of a larger purpose running through subsequent world cup campaigns. For the reference of readers, I am reproducing the link of the article here: Cup needs oomph to recapture its lustre.
There are no doubt many valid points in the article and with all due respect and no discredit whatsoever to Australia, their comprehensive domination of the 2003 and 2007 World Cups may have robbed the tournament of some excitement.
You can’t blame Australia really for doing their job. Nevertheless, it is not very engrossing to watch a tournament when its winner appears to be a foregone conclusion. But it is the other thread, that a socio-cultural context is needed to make a cricket tournament truly relevant that I want to discuss here.
Is that so? Was it really black emancipation that made West Indies‘s ascendancy in the 70s so memorable? Or was it, as I am persuaded, the sheer firepower and brilliance of a near invincible ensemble of talent? Was the 1992 Cup a statement by Pakistan that they “could do too”? Or was it about young Inzamam-ul Haq’s fearlessness and Wasim Akram‘s unforgettable deliveries, you know which ones.
Was the Sanath Jayasuriya–Romesh Kaluwitharana partnership not a staggering innovation of the 1996 Cup and, arguably, just as important to the game, as the arrival of Lanka as a force to be more than reckoned with? If a sport needs a larger social cause to make its presence felt, does that not imply feeble reach of the sport itself? Should a game not sustain itself on its own steam? It ought to and it usually does and I will illustrate below the overrated importance of social context in sports.
Anyway, here’s the example. Williams sisters’s success in women’s tennis heralded an unprecedented era of overwhelming black dominance of women’s tennis. And if I haven’t got my tennis history wrong, no black men’s tennis’s player dominated tennis in this fashion before the duo either, though Arthur Ashe, for one, was one of the greats of the game.
A few years after the Williams’ era commenced, began the Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal rivalry. Neither player is making a statement for his country beyond a limited extent (and possibly inferred more by the media than intended by the respective players).
They play great tennis for the sake of playing and competing to win. You decide which era of tennis has been more memorable and noteworthy, the one with a ‘powerful social context’ or the one riding purely on the glory of the great game of tennis.
So, in summing up, I don’t share much enthusiasm for the clamour for a larger theme to lend relevance to sport. No, the sport must throw up feats of sporting glory spectacular enough to demand being watched and paid for and it is that which will ultimately sustain it. In fact, it could be argued that the reason the 2003 and 2007 Cups didn’t kill the tournament was Australia were too beautiful to behold in their domination to contemplate such an idea.
Indeed, an Adam Gilchrist special in the 2007 edition ensured it ended with at least a semblance of a thunderclap by way of providing a fitting stage for spectacular cricketing feats, which is all the Cup is meant for, at the end of the day. This edition, with a more open field, may yet prove more tedious, at least for me, if the quality of cricket is not so compelling. We shall see, that’s for the post mortem in a couple of month’s time.
P.S: A disclaimer here. I admit to an element of bias being the motivation for writing this article. The 1999 World Cup is my favourite edition and I therefore reacted to the suggestion that the tournament peaked with the 1996 edition.
(Madan Mohan, a 25-year old CA from Mumbai, is passionate about writing, music and cricket. Writing on cricket is like the icing on the cake)
