Posted by We wrote about the various World Cup storylines during the quarter-finals. The stories of Tendulkar and Murali, two ageing greats, seem to be the strongest now, but that’s mostly due to hindsight.
All the same, it makes for a good narrative. There’s also a minor subplot that no-one will care about: it’s Lancashire v Yorkshire!
We’re pretty keen for Tendulkar to win the World Cup in his home city, because that really would be a good story. Then again, he did play 16 matches for Yorkshire almost 20 years ago. Still not forgiven him for that.
Murali, by contrast, is an honorary Lancastrian having represented the county a bucketload of times. He too is one of our favourite cricketers and we’d love to see him win the World Cup in his final international match, if only to see just how much one man can smile.
Either way, it’s a lose-lose situation – that’s how we’re viewing it with our famously boundless optimism.
I’m so captivated by this tournament I don’t even know what day the final is on.
Its funny how a tournament like this divides people. Now I seem to have two groups of friends, one who eagerly look forward to the final and another who feel the need to declare they are not interested.
Whatever your team and whatever your attitude to one-day cricket, we’d say the World Cup final is worthy of attention.
It is meaningful sporting competition and worth paying attention to even if cricket isn’t your favourite sport.
I agree. I was merely commenting on the attitude of some of my (facebook) friends.
If any event “world cup” in it, people should go ahead and watch it if you ask me.
People who need to declare their disinterest in the World Cup are tossers. They remind me of people who butt into a conversation about cricket and declare loudly “Oh, cricket. Boriiing! Who plays it anyway?” The only way to deal with such people is to say “Fuck off, douchebag”
I see the same stuff on FB. “Cricket – boring.” Well, then STFU and go back to watching Thugby or Bloody Aerial Ping Pong or whatever it is you *do* find interesting. And get out of the cricket discussion I am having with someone else who is interested in it.
I feel like an absolute tool for pointing this out, but disinterested is not the same thing as uninterested. You mean uninterested, chowsker. We are all disinterested, unless we own shares in BCCI or Cricket Sri Lanka or Hero Honda or whatever!
The trouble is that an ODI World Cup is like Rugby 7’s – it simply isn’t in the premium format so I really struggle when it’s a neutral game. If England were any good I’d be interested while it was happening (a la the T20 recently) – so it’s not been too exciting since 1992.
On top of that, there are too few teams – they all play England enough to be classed as rivals so supporting one side over the other is hard. Also – how many times have India played Sri Lanka recently? There seem to have been a lot of matches between the two of late.
Meh. I can tell I’ve annoyed people so I’ll leave it at that.
Well I for one am excited. I have people coming over, and am doing a full english breakfast for the start of play and then afternoon tea and cheeseboard for the afternoon.
Shit. We’re doing nothing. Can we come over?
Sure. The more, the merrier.