Pashminas and Earrings...

The Daze the Day After...

    The Australian team were better than South Africa on the day, and night, and deserved to progress to their eighth final but they were also good enough to admit that they enjoyed the ‘rub of the green’ during the semi-final at Eden Gardens yesterday.

    “It was obviously a pretty bare wicket. I'm not sure if it was slightly tougher to start with the bat due to it being under covers for some amount of time, but we saw it had very, very inconsistent pace, it did ‘nip’ a little bit, and there was a little bit of swing. It made it tough to bat on in the first 10 overs that we bowled,” said Mitchell Starc afterwards.

    South Africa chose to bat so they had themselves to blame, but nobody predicted the difficulties of the first 90 minutes and Starc confirmed that Australia, too, would have batted had they won the toss. 

    “We were able to build a lot of dot balls on them,” said Starc using language which would be hard to explain to non-cricket followers, “which brings a shot like Quinton played. He's obviously been a big part of their World Cup so to see the back of him early and get their middle order in, sooner rather than towards the back end, where they can play with freedom, was (the plan) we drew up.” And it worked perfectly.

    David Miller’s brilliant century “felt a bit hollow” he admitted afterwards. One of just two survivors, with Quinton de Kock, from the last semi-final loss, against New Zealand at a different Eden (Park) in Auckland eight years ago, he confirmed the aftermath of defeat was different:

    “There were a lot more tears in Auckland but it’s still not a great feeling, a bit hollow. As Quinny said before the game, even with his four hundreds he’d be happy not to score another run if we got to the final and had a crack at winning the cup,” Miller said.

    “It’s been such a good campaign as a team, to lose this is incredibly frustrating. We spoke about creating great memories and we did that, the guys showed great spirit and character, not just tonight but throughout the campaign,” Miller said.

    “That’s the game of cricket, I suppose, it wasn’t to be tonight. We’ll see what lies in the future but for me, I’ll just take it year by year,” the 34-year-old said.  

    Sifting through the debris of defeat, especially South African World Cup ‘failures’, is amongst the grimmer tasks in sports writing. Especially in the immediate day or two afterwards. You just want everyone to shut up, calm down and have a coffee.

    But the post-mortems pay the bills. At least I can delay the process for a few days here, the joys of my own platform. I will get through the next few days without coffees until I arrive home.

    The ‘daze the day after’ was spent in the markets of Kolkata buying hand-crafted earrings and Pashmina scarves for my daughters. I wandered the banks of a Birmingham canal in 1999 and floundered in St.Lucia in 2007, missing a flight. In 2015 I stayed in bed all day having finished work just after 7:30am.

    This time was infinitely better, the peanut-seller, pashmina merchant and beer-man all assuring me than ‘another 20 runs, South Africa win… bad luck, good team, next time.’

    As Rob Walter said last night, it’s tricky to get excited about the final when the time, energy and anguish expended for all these weeks leaves you feeling drained. But India have been the best team in the tournament by a distance and they deserve to win it.

Where do all the millions of people who live on the streets wash and get their drinking water? From communal points like these…