So far, so thoroughly enjoyable. Holland beating England (with one of UCT’s finest guiding the Dutch home), Australia crashing out, South Africa looking menacing — I wasn’t sure I could handle more 20-over cricket after the Indian Premier League packed up and went home, but a week into the Twenty20 World Cup, and I have to confess I’m finding it enormously good fun.

There’s an integrity to competition at international level that lifts the meaning of the tournament beyond the raw commercial intent of the IPL, even if you get the sense that the current tournament does serve in no small part as an audition for next season’s Indian pension scheme. And the complexity of emotion sparked by having teams with both South Africans and Australians in is no more — we can focus firmly on barracking for South Africa, and whoever’s playing against Australia or England. As with the Super 14 final, every South African was a Dutchman last Friday night as Holland snuck to chaotic victory.

But if supporting your national team has far greater meaning than cheering on the Daredevils or the Chargers, so the international tournament has a couple of comparative flaws, most noticeably the absence of the world’s best players. Take Australia, suddenly rendered a very ordinary team, but without six players the selectors would have taken in an instant: Hayden, Gilchrist, Warne (all retired), Symonds (officially mad), Nannes (playing for Holland) and Hodge, overlooked for some reason despite playing a lone hand in a dismal Knight Riders middle order.

Ask any bowler in England at the moment who they’d prefer to be batting with Ponting in the top four — Gilchrist, Hayden and Symonds, or Watson, Warner and Haddin — and you’ll only get one answer. It’s a while since an Australian side has looked quite so impotent, and while the Test game is a different sport entirely, the Ashes hardly looms as a clash between cricket’s finest teams at the moment.

Australia’s reward for an early departure, as Ponting ruefully pointed out in the post-match interview, is a fortnight in Leicester, harsh punishment even for Australians; Sri Lanka’s reward, on paper at least, is a gentle Super Eight line-up of Ireland and New Zealand (sadly not the Netherlands though). But after Ryan Ten Doeschate, formerly of UCT and now playing for Essex, saw the Dutch home against England, and Ireland dumped Bangladesh out, the little teams have made a clear point at the World Cup, and are playing in a format that rewards adventurous play, and lends itself to an upset more than any other format of cricket.

It’s still looking awfully like a South Africa-India final, though, particularly after South Africa’s morale-boosting burglary of the Kiwis (it’ll be a while before South Africa bats that poorly again), with Sri Lanka and Pakistan the challengers in chief; it’s the country-versus-country format that’s the real attraction, and one that’s kept the game’s dynamite format going despite IPL overkill. Even if the IPL can command the players that, illogically, the World Cup can’t.

So here, in a flippant act of hypothetical selection, is my all-star team of players not involved in the Twenty20 World Cup: Hayden, Gilchrist, Dravid, Tendulkar, Symonds, Hodge, Harris, Warne, Nehra, Langeveldt, Kumble. I’d back that team to beat anyone in the World Cup; well, almost anyone. There’s one team that would probably come out on top, and that’s the team that slaughtered Scotland on Sunday, and got out of jail against New Zealand. Come on South Africa…

  • Contact Dan at dan@metropolis.co.za


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