New Zealand cricket fans on a rollercoaster ride (5 June 1999)

5 June 1999

New Zealand cricket fans on a rollercoaster ride

The Christchurch Press

Any passionate supporter of New Zealand cricket is given the full treatment by the Black Caps.

Following the progress of our cricketing pilgrims at the World Cup is like travelling on one of those switch-back railways. Soaring ups are followed by plummeting downs in rapid, almost regulated, succession. It's all a bit breathtaking.

But, here they are in the final six, confounding the infidels and the betting shops once again with their customary blend of the sublime and the awful. And they have got there ahead of England, Sri Lanka, and the West Indies who were all fancied to carry off the silverware.

True to form, the British sporting press has ceased heaping derision on the lesser teams like New Zealand and Zimbabwe and turned on its own national outfit like a pack of starved hunting dogs. Such are the rewards of failure in professional sport. Confirmation of that can be readily provided by the All Blacks.

Cricket is a complicated game but the complexities of actually playing it are as nothing beside the mathematical maelstrom that qualifying for the World Cup play-offs has created. It is a system that Bill Gates would have been proud to have devised -- devised not in the Long Room at Lords but by somebody whose love is not cricket but calculus.

Those who have tried to follow the methodology -- and the logic -- of this extraordinary arrangement have been rewarded by the glorious illogic of several teams, New Zealand included, having qualified largely because of the eccentricities of the system. It resulted in the bizarre spectacle of a work-to-rule by the Australian batsmen whose primary purpose was not to score runs but to keep New Zealand outside with its nose pressed to the window and the two portable points in its pocket rendered useless.

To the horror of some of those who approved it, it has turned out to be a kind of affirmative action programme in disguise. The underprivileged have been promoted at the expense of the well-endowed. And who are we to complain? A conventional qualification system would have seen the Black Caps back home by now. Beggars can't be choosers.

Dare we now hope that this might become New Zealand's big year? Or is there satisfaction enough in simply getting to the final six? Against the amateurs of Scotland the Black Caps looked like real professionals for much of the time and there is nothing like an opportunity to give another team -- no matter how modest it may be -- a total walloping as a confidence booster.

The first opponents, the miracle men of Zimbabwe who manage to field a respectable team every year from a cricketing population the equivalent of Hawkes Bay, will be no easy-beats. After that, who knows?

The Black Caps, as the Australians know better than most, are more than capable of beating anyone if the mood takes them. If the mood can seize them and hold them in its grip for four matches on the trot then the cricket world might be faced with the unthinkable.

Regardless of whatever happens from here on, the masters of logic who compile the world one-day cricket rankings will have no choice but to lift New Zealand off the bottom of the table.

Or will fuzzy logic, the purpose of which is to keep things as they are, continue to apply?

Source :: The Christchurch Press