Sunday, 12 April 2009

A touch of the Irish

Cricket has its own World Cup, you know. Granted, it’s inconceivable that the winner of the next tournament (or even the one after that) could come from outside a little group of eight elite countries – England, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and considering the panoply of states present at the United Nations I guess that may seem a bit pathetic to you, but at least it’s a start. Until the early nineteen-seventies the idea of a Cricket World Cup was completely unheard of, although at the time cricket was still rather an amateurish sport in terms of organisation and remuneration, and world travel was less developed.

Now there’s even a qualifying tournament, with some surprising countries slugging it out in the South African sunshine. Namibia you might expect – South African neighbours after all, and showing a fair few Voortrekker-like names in the batting line-up. Scotland perhaps. But would you have expected Denmark to figure? Or The Netherlands? Or Uganda? Or Afghanistan.

Yes, you heard correctly. Afghanistan. Remember that place?

The Afghans are the surprise package of this tournament, and considering what’s going on back home, isn’t that just a thing? In the pre-qualifying tournaments they swept all before them, and here they’ve just beaten the much-fancied Irish. Between them the Afghans mustered just 218 runs in their allotted 300 balls. (That’s 50 ‘overs’ in cricket-speak, an over being the six balls one bowler is allowed to deliver in succession.) The talented Irish batters wouldn’t have considered this too challenging a target, but they failed to make it by 22 runs. The Afghan fast bowler, Hamid Hassan, took five wickets, shattering the stumps four times, and according to his blog, was pretty overwhelmed. To think, he said, that only two years ago they’d lost to Singapore (which probably has about three cricketers) in Division 5 of the World Cricket League, and now this…

The e-mails from Afghan supporters are flooding in. Typical is one from Wali Jalalzai. ‘Congratulations to all my Afghan heroes’, he writes, ‘You really made us proud. Keep it up. We are all praying for you.’ Reading the messages is quite an emotional experience. The affirmation this win brings them carries real significance in a world where sporting success is often venal and/or trivial.

The Irish have suffered an embarrassing reverse. But in the past it’s been their role to dish it out to others, and considering their rugby and football teams are having rather a good year, if there are any good Catholics in their number perhaps they’ll see it as God’s way of keeping them humble. The best Irish cricket story concerns the 1969 West Indian team touring England. The West Indians were in the process of rebuilding a squad and lost their series of games with an unremarkable English team. But in the middle of the tour, there came a moment for what was really just a goodwill trip over the water to Ireland. The gap in class should have been unbridgeable. The Irish should have come nowhere. Instead the West Indians were caught on an unpredictable pitch and bowled out for a total of 25. This is folks, as I’m sure you recognise, a very low score indeed. In fact it’s the lowest score ever recorded against an Irish team, surpassing even the paltry 29 a New York team once managed about a hundred years ago. I’m sorry to mention that.

Was Irish hospitality to blame? Or were the West Indians just too relaxed. Or recovering from seasickness? Whatever, when they next visited Britain four years later, the itinerary mysteriously omitted a trip to the Emerald Isle. And when they returned in 1984, they took no chances and batting first scored almost 600 in their only innings. That’s sport. Up one moment, down the next. But for now, let’s hope the Afghans keep winning. They need it more than anyone else, even the Irish, despite the latter’s basket-case economy.