CRICKET: World Cup

▪ 1997

      Twenty-one years after its introduction to international cricket, Sri Lanka dominated the sixth World Cup to become the world champion of one-day cricket. To cap a remarkable tournament for the 66-1 outsiders, Sri Lanka beat the favourite, Australia, by seven wickets in a final held exactly a month after the Australian team had refused to play its group match against Sri Lanka in Colombo because of fears for the security of the team in the wake of a terrorist bomb that exploded in the Sri Lankan capital just 15 days before the start of the tournament. The West Indies team also forfeited its group match rather than play in Sri Lanka.

      In terms of organization and structure, the World Cup, held in Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka, bore out many of the fears expressed before the start. The tournament was too unwieldy, too long, and too commercialized. Teams spent nearly three weeks and played five group matches just to eliminate four teams—Zimbabwe, Kenya, The Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates—from the field of 12. England, for example, lost three of its group matches yet still qualified for the quarterfinals. While most other nations played to the traditional patterns of one-day cricket, building an innings slowly and relying on medium-pace bowling to contain runs, Sri Lanka took advantage of the rules that allowed only two fielders to be set deep in the first 15 overs of a match to score heavily in the opening overs and used four spinners. S.T. Jayasuriya, usually a big-hitting lower-order batsman, was promoted to open the innings, a move so novel that cricket had to borrow from baseball the term pinch hitter to describe him.

      The group matches were largely unmemorable, apart from Kenya's defeat of the West Indies by 73 runs. Typically, the West Indies beat Australia in its next group match, but a defeat by the same team in the semifinals when the West Indies lost 8 wickets for 37 runs to lose by 5 runs brought to an unhappy end the international career of R.B. Richardson, the captain, who had already announced his retirement from international cricket at the end of the tournament. Sri Lanka beat England comfortably in the quarterfinals and was leading India in the semifinals when a riot broke out in the crowd of 110,000 in Calcutta. After a 20-minute delay, the referee, former West Indies captain Clive Lloyd, was unable to restart play and awarded the win to Sri Lanka. In the final P.A. De Silva (107 not out) and A. Ranatunga (47 not out), the captain of Sri Lanka, put on 97 for the fourth wicket to guide Sri Lanka to 245 for 3 past the Australian total of 241 for 7. De Silva and Ranatunga topped the tournament batting averages, while S.R. Tendulkar (see BIOGRAPHIES (Tendulkar, Sachin Ramesh )), who succeeded Mohammed Azharuddin as captain of India later in the year, was the highest run scorer, with 523. (ANDREW LONGMORE)

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