The X factor of cricket World Cup 2011

From a Cup-winning quintet of slow medium swingers in 1983 to Mark Greatbatch showing how to take advantage of fielding restrictions, each World Cup has produced a secret formula for success that nobody predicted and also introduced new dimensions to the one-day game. What will it be this time? DNA looks back, and then looks ahead.

1983
The five swingers
Every World Cup throws up an X factor. Think back to the array of gentle swing bowlers who won it for India in 1983 — Mohinder Amarnath, Madan Lal, Balwinder Singh Sandhu, Roger Binny, and Kapil Dev. Only Kapil had genuine pace in that lot, but this swinging set turned out to be the perfect bowling attack for a typical early English summer when seam and swing becomes harder to negotiate than speed and bounce. The Indians easily defended 183 in the final, and remember it was 60 overs a side. Amarnath’s wobble and Sandhu’s ‘banana ball’ that started out as a wide but swooped in to take Greenidge’s off bail as he shouldered arms, were deadlier than the four-pronged Windies pace battery that had dominated World Cup cricket until then. Who would have imagined that at the start of the competition?

1987
Stealth attack
The 1983 victory also ended the white man’s rule in cricket administration, and brought the quadrennial event itself to the sub-continent in 1987. India and Pakistan were favourites with home advantage for their spinners. But the X factor in this World Cup was a stealth attack so unobtrusive as to go unnoticed until the game was up. Both England and Australia employed tactics that were counter-intuitive for one-day cricket. Instead of stepping down the track and playing lofted shots, the usual mode of attack against a spinner, Gooch and Gatting quietly swept India out of the World Cup in the semi-final in Mumbai, rolling the ball for singles and twos in a wide arc from mid-wicket to fine leg with a stroke they had perfected in the nets. Australia had its own stealth weapon, however, in the final. Bobby Simpson was their coach, and he taught them a trick he and Bill Lawry had used in Test cricket as openers: playing the ball with soft hands short of the fielders and stealing singles. The Aussies in 1987 hardly ever played a dot ball. This is a familiar ploy today, and fielders are alert to it, but back then it was something novel in the one-day game and helped a team that was not the strongest on paper to lift the cup.

1991-92
A great idea
Four years later, down under, the innovation came from the Kiwis who had an intelligent captain in Martin Crowe — and yes, he’s a cousin of Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind. Crowe targeted the field restrictions in the first 15 overs. Individual batsmen like our current chairman of selectors Krish Srikkanth had done that earlier, but nobody had gone about it in a systematic way like the Kiwis did in 1991-92. They sent Mark Greatbatch out as a makeshift opener and all he tried to do was to loft the ball over the infield into vacant spaces. He didn’t try to hit it too hard, to make sure he connected, and collected most of his runs in two’s and three’s. Only the sheer brilliance of newcomer Inzamam-ul Haq under the astute leadership of Imran Khan pipped New Zealand at the post for a semi-final berth. Still, for a team with limited resources, New Zealand gave a good account of themselves by introducing a new element into the game.

1996
Greatbatch squared
By the time 1996 came around, the Sri Lankans had figured out that if Greatbatch could be so disruptive, there would be a double whammy with pinch-hitters at both ends to take advantage of the fielding restrictions, especially on the flat sub-continental pitches of that World Cup. They converted Sanath Jayasuriya and Romesh Kaluwitharana into openers during the preceding tour of Australia. This cavalier approach took a team that had previously never qualified out of the preliminary rounds all the way to World Cup victory.

1999
Waugh Waugh
The X factor in the 1999 World Cup was perhaps more fortuitous than an innovation or tactic. Sachin Tendulkar had said at the start of that tournament that the conditions in England would require a reversal of approach. Teams would have to go back to the traditional mindset of seeing off the new ball and going for shots in the latter half of the innings when the ball stops swinging. Azharuddin even moved Tendulkar down to number four, but these last-minute changes boomeranged because they seemed to upset the batting line-up. Australia, on the other hand, had their captain and in-form batsman Steve Waugh at number six, where he had always batted. This was decisive in the end. Australia were almost down and out in the last qualifying match and subsequent semi-final, both against South Africa. Each time, Steve Waugh resurrected the innings.

2003
India’s keeper
Not much attention has been paid in World Cup lore to Sourav Ganguly’s move to make Rahul Dravid the wicket-keeper in the 2003 team, but it had multiple effects which contributed to India’s progress to the final. Those who criticise saddling one of India’s batting greats with this additional burden forget that Dravid had earlier been dropped from the one-day side because he had become a slowpoke. Donning the keeping gloves in fact freed up Dravid’s one-day game, perhaps because he no longer worried about retaining his place in the eleven. Being an expert first slipper, Dravid also proved to be sharp enough behind the wickets not to spill catches. What this did of course was to enable India to play seven top order batsmen. The point is often made that a seventh batsman can hardly undo the wrongs of the six others. But a team that is aware of its batting depth tends to play with more enterprise, which is exactly what India did chasing a challenging target against Pakistan in Jo’burg. And there were other occasions, such as in the tricky semi-final against Kenya, where India were able to pull through after losing a bunch of wickets. MS Dhoni would do well to remember 2003 because he has lately been saying in interviews that he might play five specialist bowlers in this World Cup to accommodate an extra spinner. But more on that a little later.

2007
Squashed
2007 was a forgettable World Cup for India, losing to Bangladesh and exiting in the first round. But it threw up two unforgettable performances — Lasith Malinga’s four wickets in four balls against South Africa, and Gilchrist’s 149 in 104 balls in the final against Sri Lanka. Both were freaky in their own way. Malinga the Slinga was a new phenomenon that nobody had had time to figure out — not that studying his low-flying yorkers has helped matters a great deal for batsmen even now. But if the Malinga factor took Sri Lanka to the final, Gilchrist literally squashed their dreams of a second World Cup with a hidden weapon. The aging Aussie opener had done nothing of note in the previous games, and was willing to try anything to change his fortunes. Prompted by a baseball coach, who had been drafted in for new ideas in fielding, Gilchrist slipped a squash ball into his batting glove. This allegedly gave a spring action to his strokes at the point of impact, and the Sri Lankans, who came to know of it only after the match, protested the use of a ‘performance-enhancing device’. The Australians claimed Gilchrist had only used the squash ball to improve his grip on the bat, and the ICC dismissed the Lankan complaint. Gilchrist stopped using the ball-in-glove contraption after that, and the idea never caught on. So this will remain a mystery — whether it was the squash ball that put a zing in Gilly or simply his belief that it would.

2011
Spin twins
Finally, it’s time to look ahead at the World Cup starting in less than a month. What will be the X factor this time? Or has one-day cricket matured so much, and T20 cricket been so innovative, that there are no surprises left for us? Well, already there’s an idea that this might be the first World Cup to be won by spinners. The only real point of debate in the selection of the Indian squad of 15 was leg-spinner Piyush Chawla, whose inclusion came at the cost of an extra batsman, Rohit Sharma, or an extra medium-pacer, Sreesanth. Chief selector Srikkanth and captain Dhoni, who made intelligent use of spin to win the IPL for Chennai last year, hope to pull off something similar as the World Cup campaign stretches into the latter half of March, when the weather will turn warmer and the pitches drier.

India can call upon three full-fledged spinners — Harbhajan, Ashwin and Chawla — as well as four part-timers — Yuvraj, Raina, Pathan and possibly Sehwag if his shoulder recovers fully. But here’s the catch: if Dhoni and Kirsten are bold enough to go in with two full-time, wicket-taking spinners, which is after all the logic of picking three of them in the 15, then they will have to sacrifice either a batsman or a medium-pacer. Both options disturb the balance of the side that has been doing so well over the past year. Dropping a medium-pacer means employing a spinner in the first 15 overs with fielding restrictions, because you would need to save up some of the pace quota for the batting powerplay and the death. The more tempting option for Dhoni will be to drop the seventh batsman on the theory that we’re going to have flat tracks which make a batting collapse unlikely. But it is in fact the seventh batsman, Yusuf Pathan, who pulled off rescue acts in recent one-dayers both at home and in South Africa.

Remembering that the World Cup becomes a knock-out from the quarter-finals this time, Dhoni and Kirsten will get no second chance if they get the combination wrong. If they pick a second specialist spinner, it may be better to drop a medium-pacer, not the seventh batsman. Playing five specialist bowlers and going a batsman short has rarely worked for India. It’s an intriguing conundrum; so, whether the X factor in this World Cup works in India’s favour or against may well lie in Dhoni’s hands.