Wednesday’s Irish victory at the cricket world cup was remarkable in various ways, not least in how it was achieved. England might not be likely cup winners, but they’re not as bad as some believe, and their 50-over score of 327 for 8 would have been hard for one of the Test-playing sides to beat, never mind one of the associate teams.
Andrew Strauss’s men, however, are proving to be both careless and complacent when in control, and their inability to score more than 33 from the final five overs gave the Irish some tiny hope that wouldn’t have been there with a target of, say, 348 rather than 328.
At 0 for 1 (when captain William Porterfield dragged Jimmy Anderson’s loosener into his stumps), then 111 for 5 – and needing to score at eight-and-a-half an over – the Irish didn’t have a chance. Then came Kevin O’Brien and his century off just 50 balls – the sixth-fastest hundred ever scored in a one-day international and comfortably the fastest in any world cup match, beating Matthew Hayden’s 66-ball effort for Australia against South Africa in the 2007 tournament.
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The 26-year-old Dubliner blazed away with 13 fours and six sixes, highlighting another English failing in the process: they become flappy and ill-disciplined if the attack is carried to them. This also happened in the win over the Netherlands and the tie with India – both of which were tremendous contests. If there is one criticism that cannot be laid at England’s door, it’s that of serving up dull cricket: the three most enthralling matches in the tournament thus far have been the three involving the men from the shires. The irony is that England are still much more likely to qualify for the knockout stages than are Ireland, who had earlier lost a tight and crucial match against Bangladesh, the most minnow-like of the major nations. England still only need to beat two of South Africa, the West Indies and Bangladesh to progress (and against the latter pair they will start as favourites, albeit wobbly ones), while the Irish must hope for another miracle against India, the West Indies or South Africa and then beat the Dutch in their final group-stage game. Chances are they won’t do it, but Kevin O’Brien going forearm-to-forearm with Trinidad’s Kieron Pollard in a tonkfest at Mohali on Friday week ought to be entertaining. Until O’Brien’s wonder-innings, Pollard had perhaps been the most crowd-pleasing player in the tournament, shambling to the wicket against the Netherlands wearing what looked suspiciously like one of Richie Richardson’s old wide-brimmed hats and proceeding to launch the ball to various far corners of Delhi. Despite Wednesday’s heroics, was the defeat of England really a long-term significant Irish cricket performance, or just another in a sporadic series of impressive one-offs? Irish cricket has had a long and meandering history, dating back to country-house games at Coole Park of Lady Gregory fame. Cricket even cropped up in one of the most celebrated poems of William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, but it was the kind with six legs rather than six stumps: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, / Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings”. A more valid Irish literary connection comes courtesy of Samuel Beckett, known to any half-decent pub-quiz aficionado as the answer to the question: “Which Nobel laureate appears in Wisden?” The creator of Krapp and Godot “had two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926, scoring 35 runs in his four innings and conceding 64 runs without taking a wicket.” He was a “gritty” left-handed opener and “a useful left-arm medium-pace bowler”. Kevin O’Brien would certainly win more prizes and be bought more drinks than Beckett on Wednesday’s evidence, however – and the man who wrote “Try Again. Fail again. Fail better” almost certainly never dyed his hair pink for charity. As regards notable Ireland matches to rival the events in Bangalore, the candidate most often mentioned was the 2007 world cup victory over Pakistan in Kingston, Jamaica. This might not have been so dramatic in individual-performance terms (Kevin O’Brien’s brother Niall was the hero that day, scoring 72), but it effectively knocked the Pakistanis out of the tournament on the same day that Bangladesh did the same to India. That Ireland–Pakistan encounter, however, has long been subject to doubt about possible – but never in any way proven – dodgy dealings on the Pakistani side. This was clearly not an issue in Wednesday’s match, given how utterly and genuinely gutted the English players looked at the end. Then there was the 2004 game against the West Indies in Belfast, when the Irish chased down 292 to beat a side including Brian Lara, Chris Gayle and Shivnarine Chanderpaul with more than three overs to spare. That, though, was just an early-tour warm-up, of far less consequence than the 2007 and 2011 real-tournament upsets. Having said that, could the only true rival to Wednesday’s mayhem be a half-forgotten festival-friendly fixture played in 1969? As a diversion during their tour of England, a strong West Indies side faced the Irish in Derry. The visitors’ batting line-up included such luminaries as Basil Butcher, Maurice Foster and a young Clive Lloyd, along with the great Clyde Walcott, who was managing the team and turned out for the occasion. The match was a curiosity even in organisational terms, with the old-fashioned idea of squeezing in two innings each during just one day’s play – with the proviso that if time ran out, the winner would come from the first-innings performance. It was clearly a light-hearted occasion, offering the West Indians an escape from the formal rigours of the main tour. But that didn’t excuse or explain what happened: the visitors batted first and were reduced to 12 for 9, before Grayson Shillingford and Philbert Blair dragged the total up to the giddy heights of 25. For Ireland, Dougie Goodwin took 5 for 6 and Alec O’Riordan 4 for 18, and the home side reached 26 – for what proved to be an eventual victory – with the loss of just one wicket. Stories abound about this match, including suggestions that the West Indians were plied with oceanic quantities of Guinness the night before – a traditional and perfectly acceptable form of match-fixing. Even Wednesday’s events in Bangalore didn’t match that for strangeness. But if the current Irish one-day squad can conjure up another great day and somehow reach the knockout stage of this world cup, then Kevin O’Brien’s batting will surely come to be seen as the finest of all achievements by an underrated cricketing nation.Find out about donating to The Caledonian Mercury
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