Stewart's triple burden was too heavy for any man

With the seventh World Cup at the halfway mark, the 12 competing countries having now been reduced to six, and only one match having gone to the second day, the organisers can congratulate themselves from several points of view.

It must be to the good that 12 county grounds (plus one each in Scotland, Ireland and Holland) have been the scene of international matches, on the whole well-supported, also that the lesser countries have had an experience from which they can only have benefited. Best of all, most of the cricket has been played in a good spirit. There has been too much appealing, of course, and inevitably some decisions which on the evidence of the camera should have gone the other way. There has been the stark contrast of brilliant cricket and some scarcely worthy of the village green.

One major sadness is that by reason of a lower run-rate the host country have been eliminated. England's policy of choosing always to bat last was arguable in some cases, seeing how poor is their record of chasing attainable totals. Alec Stewart's decision to put in India in the crucial match at Edgbaston surely gave them the better batting conditions. He likewise deprived himself of going into bat fresh instead of after keeping wicket.

Since his admirable innings in the first match, England did not again make a successful start or look like doing so. But the triple burden of captaincy, wicketkeeping and opening the innings was too heavy for any man. The selectors can only have entertained the idea because of the paucity of genuine batting/bowling all-rounders. Ashley Giles, of Warwickshire, deserved preference, I think, over Adam Hollioake (career bowling, 91 wickets at 40 runs each).

They might well have allowed Nick Knight, England's best one-day opener, say, two matches to recover form. Other preferences might have made a difference sufficient to lift England to the last six, but surely no further. There is simply not the quality, and one has to go back to the wrong turnings English cricket has taken over the last 20 years for the causes.

They begin with the complete covering of pitches and the over-emphasis on the demands of the one-day game: bowling to contain rather than to take wickets, batting in which first principles are ignored in the chase for runs.

The only benefit from England's early elimination is that those who chose players and coaches have been given a bit longer to prepare for the four-Test series against New Zealand, itself a testing ground for England's tour to South Africa in the autumn.

Michael Vaughan, Yorkshire's opening bat, won wide admiration on and off the field for his leadership on last winter's England A tour to South Africa and Zimbabwe. He is one obvious candidate as are others in addition to Knight and Giles, for instance a second wicketkeeper.

Coaches and managers need humour and a certain lightness of touch in their dealings with players. In the players one looks for a sound method and an inner toughness as exemplified, let us say, by Michael Atherton.

When the resident clubs of the South took suddenly and readily to competitive cricket for league and knockout prizes 30 years ago, there was a fear that many nomadic clubs might whither away. This is so far from being the case that next year more than 30 clubs are due to take part in a nomadic clubs' festival at Oxford. The chairman of the Stragglers of Asia, Geoffrey Hartley, passed on the idea of this novel celebration of the millennium to B G Brocklehurst, owner and chairman of The Cricketer who thus initiates another promotion to add to the National Village Championship, the Lord's Taverners' Colts Trophy for schools and other competitions administered and at times financed by the magazine.

The point about this nomadic festival is that there are no points at stake nor any prize - just the joy of playing the game. It will last five days in August 2000 and culminate in a very large dinner at Keble, chaired by the patron of the festival, Lord Cowdrey. The oldest wandering club, I Zingari, have entered along with Free Foresters, Cryptics, the Leprechauns from Ireland, the Kongonies from Kenya, the Flamingoes from Holland, and many county clubs such as the Hampshire Hogs, Wiltshire Queries and the Yorkshire Gentlemen.

All clubs need the direction of devoted officers, and few can match the service to the Cryptics of the Fawcuses, father and son. John Fawcus, one of the founders of the club in 1910, took on the secretaryship until his health failed in 1949, whereupon his son Harold succeeded him, retiring recently in the club's 90th year.

Talking of wandering clubs, I owe an apology to the president of the Free Foresters, Philip Whitcombe, in relation to the one defeat of the 1949 New Zealanders in the Oxford Parks which I mentioned a while ago. Their destroyers were Michael Wrigley and Whitcombe, who had been rated the year before by Sir Donald Bradman as the second best opening bowler in England after Alec Bedser.