Gallantly armed ... for glory?

Indian expectations of its cricket team invariably oscillate between a cynical pessimism and a hopelessly unjustified optimism. But, history has shown repeatedly that anything can happen in the cricket World Cup, writes MUKUND PADMANABHAN.

Cricket's big event ... For the first time across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

IF cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties, then its one-day version is sheer caprice. Sometimes, it seems that one-day cricket was invented not merely to electrify but also to confound punditry. Watching it on television, it is impossible not be struck by how often the commentators get it wrong — their predictions askew, the expectations belied, their certainties exploded.

There is a lesson for cricket experts in this: better be circumspect than cocksure. (This is one of the many reasons why Navjot Singh Sidhu's pushy and self-assertive confidence is hugely unappealing while Alan Wilkins' hesitant, almost apologetic, manner is not.) This lesson becomes all the more important when you are talking about the World Cup which, at the end of the day, is a series of tricky and fluctuating one-day contests.

While working on an article for a weekly magazine on the 1992 World Cup, we asked six experts — five former Test cricketers and one cricket administrator — which team would win. All of them picked defending champion Australia, which failed to qualify. Pakistan, which eventually walked away with the Cup, was low down in the order of preferences. M.A.K. Pataudi even scoffed: "I don't give them a chance."

But this is hardly surprising. In 1983, you might have been regarded as a blind flag-waver or as a totally deranged person (or both) if you had backed Kapil's Devils as Cup winners. Recall how the wry and sardonic tones of the English commentators were forced to change as India saw off England and then took the West Indies out in the final?

Conventional wisdom had it that India was a strong contender to win again in 1987, but that year belonged to Allan Border's grossly underestimated side. And in 1992, Sri Lanka was on nobody's radar. Sanath Jayasuriya — the batsman who dominated the Cup — wasn't even mentioned in the pre-tournament Men-To-Watch lists.

Only the West Indies have overcome the vagaries of the World Cup, winning comprehensively and most predictably in 1975 and 1979. It is a measure of the extraordinary prowess and preeminence of the side during those years that it was able to do this.

It may not seem this way, but other sporting events are much better foretold. Take World Cup soccer, for example. On the face of it, it is an extremely tough task to select between teams that rarely play each other as nations in the intervals between cups. Yet, forecasting is much easier in World Cup soccer than in World Cup cricket, even though participating nations are playing each other all the time.

Of course, there are upset years in football (example: France's victory a few years ago). But the fact is that these are in the nature of exceptions rather than the rule. Consider this recurring and somewhat unexciting fact about World Cup soccer: either Brazil or Germany has been in every final except one since the tournament's inception many decades ago.

Tennis, golf, motor racing, chess. You pick the sport and the chances are you will find nothing as unpredictable as a one-day cricket tournament. People win on very long odds — remember the stories of the number of punters who backed India in 1983 and went laughing all the way to Ladbrokes?

Could this be one of the reasons why betting has become so popular in the game? Whatever the truth, even the television channels are cashing in on the forecasting fever. Tune in to the curtain-raising programmes on World Cup 2003 on the sports channels and there are a plethora of prediction games. Pick the eleven who will play, identify the top scorer in a game, choose the man-of-the-match and so on. What's more, there are attractive prizes for winners too.

Special editions of magazines on World Cup South Africa (www.cricketworldcup.com) also play the forecasting game. Man's World, that glossy magazine in which some very good prose is invariably and somewhat inexplicably sandwiched between pictures of male models, dusky babes and fashion accessories, ask the question directly on the cover of its latest issue: "Can India Win The World Cup?"

No, say virtually everyone who contributed an article. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Arun Jaitley thinks it is going to be Australia. The great legspinner B.S. Chandrashekhar would rather put his money on South Africa. Two financial analysts with an interest in cricket declare that India will not merely be beaten, but will be drubbed.

There are all manner of predictions here and I read the articles with a mixture of interest and amusement. I was particularly tickled by Surjit S. Bhalla's intriguing piece, in which he applies the CricketX model, which is based on a complete record of player and team performance in every one-day international since 1971, to make his forecast. The model tells Bhalla that South Africa will win, but all the same he advises that some money be kept aside for Australia.

Bhalla makes much of the fact that when applied retrospectively, CricketX correctly identifies at least three out of four semi-finalists in every World Cup except one. But surely predicting the semi-finalist line up with an accuracy of less than 75 per cent is unexceptional. The West Indies, Australia and England would have been on anybody's list until 1979 and the only question then was whether Pakistan or New Zealand would occupy the fourth slot.

It is true that the field widened with the advent of India and Sri Lanka as one-day cricketing powers and the entry of South Africa. But even today, there are only six or seven teams that are serious challengers for the semi-final slots. Getting three out of them right is ... well ... not exactly a statistical feat.

What about forecasting the winner? With the exceptions of 1975 and 1979, CricketX has got it wrong every time. Bhalla admits that in this respect, the forecasting model is "not so accurate". While his article is candid and stimulating, one can't help feeling that his calculus only establishes the opposite of what it wants to. In other words, it determines that the vagaries of international one-day cricket tournaments defeat the most comprehensive of statistically rigorous forecasts.

Even if it is attempting to predict the unpredictable, any article on the cricket World Cup cannot fail to ask: is India in with a chance? Most of those who have written the country off altogether are influenced by the team's dismal performance in New Zealand, where it recently lost five of the seven one-dayers.

But the entire New Zealand one-day series was played on extremely tricky pitches, which swung, seamed and lifted (sometimes alarmingly) and on which the batsmen were invariably at a huge disadvantage. If you discount the last of the seven matches, the top score recorded by a New Zealand batsman was 40-something — a statistic that reflects how comprehensively the ball dominated the bat. New Zealand's victory was scripted almost entirely by its indisputably superior medium-fast bowling attack. India was humiliated but its loss did not merit the gloomy, almost mournful, assessments of its cricket team that followed — the truth is that under such conditions, India, with its relatively inferior medium-fast bowlers, would have probably gone down to most sides.

Contrast this pessimism with the euphoric forecasts following India's sparkling run over the last few months, which was capped by its entry into the finals of the ICC Champions Trophy — the so-called mini World Cup. It might well have won the tournament if the final against Sri Lanka wasn't washed out by rain. Soon after, some cricket experts had begun to talk of India as the favourite to win World Cup 2003.

Here's the rub. India's expectations of its cricket team invariably oscillate between a cynical and fashionable pessimism and a hopelessly unjustified optimism. It is rarely founded on a hard-headed realism.

But what does realism mean in the context of World Cup 2003? On the one hand, it means acknowledging that there are far better sides than India (Australia and South Africa to name only two) in the fray. On the other, it means acknowledging that India cannot be written off. History has shown over and over again that anything can happen in a World Cup.

Remember 1983?

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