If it can be classed as a fitting end when the best side win a tournament, then the World Cup delivered just that.
Australia, in the final reckoning, proved to be the market leading all-round outfit with – and this was the decisive factor – the most incisive bowling attack.
For all the talk of the bat taking over, there is still life left in the bowlers out there.
With a format that wasn’t created to necessarily reward consistency – West Indies were three wins away, remember, from the title despite an underwhelming group campaign – it was pleasing to see the top four sides in the semi-finals, the top two progress and, ultimately, the strongest prevail.
And a thought now that the tournament has been put to bed for another four years until a resurgent England (don’t bite!) welcome everyone in 2019: if 50-over cricket is dead then I must have been dreaming.
Many a sporting obituary has been penned with undue haste and the one-day international, if the knockers were to have been believed, has been tantamount to a dead man walking for a while.
The unchecked proliferation of the Twenty20 game and the economic forces they drive have provided many a kick in the teeth for its longer limited-overs cousin, but from what I’ve witnessed over the past few weeks, there is life in the elder of the two yet.
And I, for one, am not buying the criticism that the game has gone too far in favour of the batting side. The so-called ‘boring middle overs’ have been negated to a large degree, and the result has been scoring on another level. Ironically enough, T20 is the direct cause of this.
You can’t get rid of one and then bemoan the arrival of the other, and while a return to one ball might not be the daftest idea, if only to encourage reverse swing, the fielding restrictions need to stay as they are.
Throughout the history of the one-day game, teams have found ways to counter the batting side and the same will come to pass.
Australia, and to a slightly lesser extent New Zealand, have shown that aggressive, full-pitched, quick bowling will still gain rewards, regardless of how gung-ho the opposition.
And if it means the end of the gentle medium-pacer then administrators will have achieved something worthwhile for a change. Enough pointless tinkering has been done in the past and now that a relevance for the format has been found it should cease.
With regards to the tournament itself, and the final to some degree, the accusation of too many one-sided contests is nonsense.
‘Only one of the quarter-finals was a decent game’, or ‘the final was a bit of a let down’ for example just aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on or the web space they occupy.
It appears to be all too easy to forget that it’s actually a sporting competition and games occasionally are dominated by one of the protagonists.
Those who tuned into the recent rugby league World Club Challenge tie between St Helens and South Sydney will have anticipated a tightly-fought battle, yet it turned out to be anything but. So what?
That’s how it is and how it will always be, so please spare me the whinging for the sake of it.
As an aside, it was somewhat apt that Michael Clarke was able to finish his yellow-clothed career in style.
Looking on from a distance, I’ve never been able to understand the criticism directed at him, and even his decision to announce his retirement a day before the final (honestly, what does it matter?) offered the cynics fuel for their ire.
But to lead his side to the trophy in his last appearance while producing his most fluent batting for a while – surely not a coincidence – must have given him cause for a satisfied smirk and a couple of the beers that Shane Warne was encouraging all and sundry to consume.
Now Michael, if you wouldn’t mind pulling that hamstring again just before July …
While a premature retirement isn’t the solution, he or England want, he may be forced into it if he can’t maintain a long run of matches.
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