Each member of the side, whether he is a senior player like Matthew Hayden or a youngster like Shaun Tait, believes that he is the best. Comparisons with the champion sides of the past are inevitable, and I remember the West Indians of the 80s whenever I see the Australians of today. Marshall considered himself the best, as did Garner, Holding and Roberts. They would give it everything on the field to prove their respective claims of being the best. Then there was the batting; Greenidge, Haynes, Lloyd and that man Viv Richards. Many a hapless opponent bore the brunt of their will to outdo each other. Not too many people liked to play the West Indies those days, and the current Australian team evokes a similar feeling.
The Australians seldom fail to implement their plans. Their goal in the final was to attack Chaminda Vaas and Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lanka’s spearheads. The contempt with which both bowlers were treated resulted in the other bowlers feeling the heat. Gilchrist was sensational. He took the odd calculated risk, as did all his team-mates, but the better you are, the luckier you tend to be. The Australians are as human as anybody else, but they commit fewer mistakes than the others.
Sri Lanka played some wonderful cricket during the course of the competition, but they were outplayed in the summit clash. That can happen in a game of cricket. Mahela Jayawardene, the selectors and the Sri Lankan public ought to take heart from the fact that they have some quality players, all of whom will only get better with time.
What I thought was unfortunate was a curtailed game. The final of a World Cup certainly merits a ‘full’ fifty-overs-a-side encounter. The final was after all the biggest attraction, which drew people from across the world to the Caribbean. They deserved a ‘full’ game. The authorities should have exercised the option of playing on the reserve day. A truncated game can give an advantage to a side that is the weaker of the two, and that isn’t something people would like to see happen in a World Cup final. Of course, the manner in which Gilchrist and Hayden began the proceedings meant that Sri Lanka were never in the game, good knocks by Jayasuriya and Sangakkara notwithstanding.
These are heady days for the Australian cricketers, but the last thing they would do is take their places for granted. They are not made like that.
PMG
The expected happened, with Australia, the best side of the competition by a mile, emerging triumphant in the final. They did not lose a single game in the tournament, ‘inconsistency’ proving to be a term Ricky Ponting and his players are clearly not aware of.
