By the time you read this article, Cricket World Cup 2015
might be at its final stage and South Africa or New Zealand would have reached
their First World Cup Final Ever. And either of them would be getting ready for
either Australia or India.
But from what we witnessed so far in this edition, few things
will remain in our memories and few will be quite unique to this World Cup.
For me, among all, the performance of the Associate Nations
stood out. I have reflected in my earlier articles on how teams like Ireland
and Afghanistan gave top test playing teams a run for their money and a
reminder to ICC on what they have not done properly at all – and that is to
help these teams grow beyond “the once in 4 years World Cups”.
This World Cup broke batting records I guess. No other world
cup saw so many teams scoring 300 plus totals. In fact, we even saw scores of
400 plus. This did not come as a huge surprise to me, as the initial indication
was to encourage good batting tracks and the likes of AB de Villiers and Glenn
Maxwell were bound to exploit it, with their fearless batting, which in itself,
is a testimonial to modern day “I play my way” cricket.
But a pleasant surprise though, was a reminder to every
cricket fan that fast bowling is not dead in shorter format of the game. No
matter how big the bats become, how flat the pitches and how audacious the
batting, if you can bowl your heart out at 140 KPH plus, you can still put the
batsmen on the back foot and in fact turn the game completely. The ‘chin music’
is here to stay!
Wahab Riaz’s scorching spell at the Aussie batsmen, Mitchell
Starc’s 150KMH Yorkers at the Kiwis were two of my favorite moments from the
cup.
What were your stand-out memories?
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