The one-day international summer continues to deliver excitement. The question is, has this been the best World Series ever?
After India’s insanely brilliant run-chase last week against Sri Lanka in Hobart, I wrote on Facebook that I had just witnessed the greatest neutral-team World Series second innings of the past 20 years.
Let’s face it; even for those who love to knock one-day internationals as obsolete, dull and inferior this has been an excellent World Series. Six matches (up to and including the first final) went to within three overs of the full distance. There’s also been a tie, not to mention a Ryobi Cup final tie.
One-day cricket is dead? Ha!
I am prepared to admit it may all be seen in a haze of childhood nostalgia (I was bred on World Series summers), but the Sun-Tue-Fri axis of one-day cricket over the last month has been riveting stuff.
The only two things wrong with this summer’s tournament have been the length (as much as I love the 12+3 format I think it’s time to ditch it for a more streamlined 9+1) and the time of year (it should have be wrapped up within a month to finish no later than the second week of February).
We’ve already had some punters on The Roar claiming the current series to be the “best ever”.
Let’s see if there’s a way to measure that phrase, shall we? I went in search of some meaningful way to check the “closeness level” of World Series competitions. Cricinfo’s statsguru feature allowed me to conduct a search for games that had gone into the final over of the second innings. That’s not exactly what I had in mind as my measuring stick – I would have liked it to be within 18 deliveries – but it gave an impression at least.
I cut the list off at 1983-84 (the Australia/West Indies/Pakistan series that I remember watching on television when I was five years old) and discounted the non-World Series summers where only a straight five-match bilateral contest was played. I likewise eliminated the 1992 World Cup.
That leaves 26 summers and 34 matches that have gone to within six balls of two full innings’ distance, which includes a number of wins off the final delivery and ties. Maybe my suggestion is wearing thin already?
I’ve only missed two tournaments – the stupid 1994-95 season where Australia A competed and the 1999-2000 contests between Australia/India/Pakistan. In the latter case I missed a couple of ripper finishes (Pakistan versus India in Brisbane and Australia versus India in Perth).
But this season there have been three games in the under-one-over category: the India versus Sri Lanka tie at Adelaide Oval, India versus Australia with two balls left at Adelaide and Sri Lanka v Australia with four left in Hobart. When was the last time that happened, I hear you ask?
Only twice in the past two decades has the World Series offered so many close finishes (by the one-over measurement). They happened in 1998-99 (Sri Lanka versus England – the potential walk-off match in Adelaide, England versus Sri Lanka at the Gabba and Sri Lanka versus Australia in Hobart) and 1995-96 (Michael Bevan’s last-ball boundary hit against the Windies in Sydney, Australia v Sri Lanka in Sydney and Sri Lanka versus Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground).
For the record, the tournaments with no such finishes of that kind were 1988-89, 1989-90, 1993-94, 2000-01, 2002-03, 2004-05 and 2005-06. A casual glance at the list of series which contained two one-over finishes also suggests that the mid-1980s were indeed a great time to be a World Series fan. The late 1990s weren’t too bad either.
New Zealand supplied two cracking games to Aussie fans in 1997-98 (Adelaide and Melbourne) and arguably one of the last super-memorable chases in the present India mould against South Africa at the Gabba in 2001-02, and again against Australia at the MCG that same summer.
So, was I right? Has this year’s action been the best in 20 years?
Perhaps not.
But this season’s World Series hasn’t been far off one of the best in the tournament’s four-decade history. And best of all, it’s apparently making yet another comeback in 2014-15, ahead of the next World Cup (Australia/India/England). If the 2011-12 revival edition is anything to go by, it should be a cracker.
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