Nine league matches may look like plenty of time to find rhythm and form, but Australia’s record in the 1992 edition should stand as a cautionary tale
Daniel Brettig29-May-2019In the lead-up to a World Cup it is customary to seek the wisdom of great cricketers, captains and former winners of the tournament.And when it comes to the World Cup, few have more credibility in terms of their record and experience than Ricky Ponting, having led Australia to consecutive victories in 2003 and 2007, having also played in the 1999 triumph of Steve Waugh’s team, the last time the event was held in England.Naturally, then, the presence of Ponting in England as Justin Langer’s assistant coach has engendered plenty of poring over his views on tournament play, summed up by a contention built up over all those years of World Cups and victories and recently shared with .”I guess that’s probably one of the reasons they’ve got me involved – having been around some successful World Cup campaigns. Tournament play is a different thing, it’s not just another five-game series or three-game series. This is all about a pretty long tournament of one-day cricket.”You’ve got to find a way to build your way into the tournament and make sure you’re playing your best cricket at the back alley. That’s one thing Australian teams have always done. They’ve tended to play their best cricket in the World Cups and when it has mattered in the big games.”Percentage of teams going through to World Cup knockout stages (including Super Sixes and Super Eights)
1975, 1979, 1983, 1987 – 50% (four of eight)
1992 – 45% (four of nine)
1996 – 66% (eight of 12)
1999 – 50% (six of 12)
2003 – 43% (six of 14)
2007 – 50% (eight of 16)
2011, 2015 – 57% (eight of 14)
2019 – 40% (four of 10)
Given these words, it has been understandable to hear Australia’s captain Aaron Finch utter similar words about finding a way to get to the semi-finals and gearing up to play the team’s “best cricket” at the pointy end of the event. After all, tournaments are won by those who are strongest at the finish, and not the start.This is all true, but only to a point. Something significant about the 2019 event is that the most relevant World Cup experience is actually derived from 27 years previously – the only previous time the tournament used the all-team round robin format that has been adopted for this edition.By using a simple league phase to pare down 10 teams to four, the ICC has not only shunted out numerous places for emerging nations, much to the chagrin of Ireland and others. It has also considerably raised the performance threshold for reaching those all-important knockout games in early July.While nine qualifying games may look like plenty of time to find rhythm and form, the fact of history is that slow starts can be very costly when only four of 10 teams go through – at 40% this is the lowest percentage of opportunity at any tournament in World Cup history.For the signal example of why this matters, one need not look anywhere other than, you guessed it, Australia. For as well as the trophy-winning teams of 1987, 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2015 mastered the vagaries of their various tournaments, the Allan Border-led and Bob Simpson-coached combination of 1992 suffered from a fatally slow start. Steve Waugh, not yet the formidable batsman and captain he would become, has reflected on the complacency that hurt them.”Looking back, maybe we believed in our own minds that making the semi-finals was a given, and then we could switch on and do the business when it counted,” Waugh wrote in his autobiography. “However, our cup ambitions were quickly extinguished, as we lost three of our first four games.”At the time, the Australians were the world’s undisputed ODI leaders, having claimed the 1987 Cup and gone on to win roughly 75% of their total games over the next four years. But the PBL/Nine-dominated programming that had given them so many more ODIs to play than other nations, helping develop Australia’s proficiency, took away in 1991-92. Allan Border’s team bounced from the finals of the annual World Series Cup, to two Tests against India, to a rudimentary two practice games and then the opener against New Zealand in Auckland.Others nations were more tactically daring than the Australians, but what quickly overcame Border, Simpson and their harried squad was the pressure of catching up from early losses with a team still finding their groove. Neither New Zealand or the recently readmitted South Africa were thought to be major threats, but both raised their games to thrash Australia at Eden Park and the SCG. Even India, comfortably beaten in the Test and one day series earlier in the summer, pushed Australia to the very brink at the Gabba in a one-run win, and then Graham Gooch’s Englishmen orchestrated another Australian hiding in Sydney.What these results meant were that at the halfway point, four games in, Australia were two games and a hefty chunk of net run rate out of fourth place, above only the winless Zimbabwe on the tournament table. Wins in three of their final four games restored a semblance of pride for Border’s team, but by the time of their final game against West Indies, they were already more or less out of the reckoning.Australia’s 1992 World Cup campaign only picked up in the latter half but it was too late for their knockout prospects•Getty ImagesWhile it is commonly cited that Pakistan went on to overcome their own lousy start – winning only one of their first five games – by squeaking into the semi-finals and producing two command displays against New Zealand and England, the degree of happenstance involved would not be recommended to any coach or captain. To earn a point from a game in which they were bowled out for 74 by England on a sticky day at Adelaide Oval, only to see heavy clouds dump enough rain to force abandonment in the afternoon, was the height of Pakistani good fortune.Less often recorded is that, on the same day they defeated a previously unbeaten New Zealand in their final league game to get into fourth, Pakistan only stayed there because it was the Australians who, playing a settled, unchanged team for the first time all tournament, eliminated West Indies in a day/night affair at the MCG. A Caribbean win that evening would have consigned Imran Khan’s cornered tiger t-shirt to his suitcase.It was a point not lost on Simpson, who conceded three years after the tournament that better preparation might have engendered a faster start. “We played poorly. In retrospect we should have gone into a camp,” he told Mark Ray in . “We got into that competition and we did everything we said we wouldn’t do. We lost totally our game plan. It was only towards the end that we started to play well. If we’d got to the semis, I’m sure we’d have won the whole bloody thing.”For Border, his own rueful conclusion was a little more blunt. “I thought of the great boxer Jack Dempsey’s motto ‘Kill the other guy before he kills you’,” he wrote in his autobiography. “If only we’d done more early in the Cup.”The tournament’s “big three” of Australia (v Afghanistan and West Indies), England (v South Africa and Pakistan) and India (v South Africa and Australia), will thus be looking eagerly towards their opening couple of games. Winning good field position early in the league will allow their teams to settle, reduce anxieties and, critically, leave destiny in their own hands later on. Building up strongly to the finish will still be vital in the 2019 World Cup, but not without early wins as the foundation.
