Yesterday’s match between England and New Zealand turned into a rout with England batting first and being dismissed for a paltry 123 off 33.2 overs, thus earning the dubious distinction of having the lowest score and batting for the fewest overs so far in the tournament. While I had predicted that England would not win this tournament, this performance was far worse than even I expected and can only be described as an utter humiliation. New Zealand, on the other hand, cemented their reputation as the team to watch in this tournament.
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This cricket World Cup has seen some fine performances by teams that are low-ranked. In addition to Ireland beating West Indies, we saw Scotland making New Zealand work hard for their win. Scotland was dismissed for only 142 in 36.2 overs, setting NZ up for an easy win. But NZ, showing an uncharacteristically cavalier attitude perhaps because they faced such an low target, lost seven wickets before reaching the score in 24.5 overs.
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The first upset win of the tournament came yesterday when Ireland defeated West Indies. The West Indies batted first and the game followed the same pattern as the previous four matches with the first team scoring 300 or more runs. In the other games, the chasing teams all failed to exceed the score but in this case, Ireland proved well up to the challenge of the WI total of 304/7 and reached it comfortably in 46 overs with four wickets in hand.
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Yesterday’s two games ended up with the expected results of the favorites winning, South Africa beating Zimbabwe and India beating Pakistan.
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Back in the day’s of my childhood, air travel was not the norm and cricketers used to travel to other countries by ship. Sri Lanka was fortunate in that it was a convenient port of call for ships that were traversing the Indian Ocean so those carrying the English, Australian, and West Indies teams would stop for a day in Colombo on their way to and from Australia. Unlike the other cricket playing nations, the West Indies team was not made up of players from a single nation but from a confederation of 15 English-speaking countries in the Caribbean.
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The World Cup starts on Saturday and in the days leading up to the event, each team has been playing two warm up matches. There have been some surprises. Yesterday lowly Zimbabwe trounced Sri Lanka. Two days earlier, Zimbabwe restricted New Zealand to a low score of 157/7 in a game that was halted because of rain, suggesting that this is a team to watch.
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In my post on the increasing role of technology in helping adjudicate close decisions in cricket, I mentioned three of them: the Hawkeye ball tracker (using multiple camera angles to track the path of the ball and predict its future trajectory), the Snickometer (that displays sound as an oscilloscope signal to show the sound if the ball struck anything), and the Hot Spot (that uses infra-red cameras to detect the minute amounts of heat generated when the ball strikes the bat or the person of the batsman).
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I have to apologize to regular readers of this blog who are not fans of cricket and are understandably mystified by the appeal of the game and wonder if I am going to talk about nothing else up to and during the cricket World Cup that runs from February 14 through March 29. This is going to be my last substantive post on it, at least until the tournament begins and I provide some brief comments on the games as they happen.
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