Cricket’s World Cup will be an interminable slog in every sense. It began on Tuesday, 13 March; the final is still six weeks away (28 April). With only a month to sort out 32 bristlingly competitive teams, football’s World Cup is comfortably more user-friendly, while rugby’s version already has plans in hand to compress itself severely for the 2011 finals and so eradicate such laughable mismatches as 1995’s New Zealand 145 – Japan 17 or 2003’s Australia 145 – Namibia 0. Might there be some similarly jokey walkovers in cricket’s Caribbean marathon? Are Scotland’s supporters bracing themselves for headlines such as ‘Calypso-Collapsos’?
Mind you, of all the minnows Scotland has the richest cricketing pedigree, providing more than a handful of talented county championship players down the century as well as, of course, two England captains in handsome bat Mike Denness and the notable, not to say notorious, Douglas Jardine.
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