Two winners and no losers on London’s sporting Super Sunday

By Rahul Banerji

Cricket balls flying off the edge of a bat often run away to the boundary. It happens. What does not, at least not usually, is the ball going for four runs when the batsman is prone on the ground and making no attempt to hit the ball at all.

That one freak occurrence involving the towering Ben Stokes fetched England a lungful of oxygen, and the runs needed to break free from the suffocating shackles imposed by New Zealand.

It was also enough to give them the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup in a nail-biting, nerve-shredding finale at Lord’s.

Across London, the longest singles final match in Wimbledon’s storied history was being played out between two of the finest ambassadors tennis has ever produced.

In the end, defending champion Novak Djokovic prevailed in four hours and 55 minutes, winning his fifth title at the expense of the greatest of them all, eight-time titleist Roger Federer.

Just to keep the drama theme going. Up in North Berwick, Austria’s Bernd Wiesberger was stretched all the way by Frenchman Benjamin Hebert in a twilight play-off at the Aberdeen Standard Investments Scottish Open.

The two finished on 22-under 262s and then stretched the elimination to a third play-off hole before the Austrian prevailed with a par on the 18th hole against Hebert’s bogey.

There was some cheer for India as Shubhankar Sharma carded his second successive 67 for a share of 34^th place alongside Rory McIlroy and six others nine shots behind the leaders.

Federer held two match points at 8-7 in the draining, emotionally exhausting final set that was decided in a tie-break for the first time at the All England Club. He failed to convert and allowed Djokovic to take the fifth set to 12-all, and a decisive third lost tie-break of the match.

Best of them all

The super-fit Serb beat Federer 7-6 (7-5), 1-6, 7-6 (7-4), 4-6, 13-12 (7-3) over 295 minutes in a match already being called the greatest in Wimbledon’s history.

At 12-12 in the fifth, the organizers should have announced the two as joint champions. Statistics and records unfortunately demand a winner and a loser.

If the Swiss maestro was unable to close out his match, what of the Black Caps? Twice they made sure scores were tied, in full match play and in the Super Over eliminator, but were still declared losers.

And on the basis of fewer boundaries hit during the match, no less.

Just how unexpected, unfortunate, unforeseen, ungenerous and just plain un-cool is that?

For the record, hosts and favourites England ended a 44-year wait for the ICC men’s Cricket World Cup, their “win” on the night in London capping three previous failed attempts, in 1979, 1987 and 1992.

With scores tied at 241 runs apiece after both teams had batted their regulation 50 overs, England posted a 16-run target for New Zealand with man of the match Stokes and Jos Buttler putting on 15 runs in the Eliminator.

In all the action

Stokes it was whose bat was in the way of a throw from the deep that ran away for an extra four runs when England were on the ropes in the last over of the match. Those six runs (two run, four overthrows) converted a situation requiring nine runs in three balls to three needed from two deliveries.

England still could not get those two, requiring the Super Over.

The resilient Kiwis came back again in the eliminator to ensure scores were level thanks to Jimmy Neesham and Martin Guptill, but the hosts were declared winners on the basis of more boundaries in their innings.

Put that in your pipe and make sense of it.

It was a chaotic and emotional end to a tournament that spanned seven weeks and needed 48 matches to decide.

For New Zealand, it was heart-break after they had equalled Australia’s record of qualifying for eight ICC World Cup semi-finals and eliminated India, one of the favoured teams at the event in the semi-finals.

Sachin ‘survives’

In terms of individual achievements, tournament top scorer Rohit Sharma (648 runs) and Australia’s David Warner (647) were both in a position to break Sachin Tendulkar’s all-time record of 673 runs at a single World Cup.

Neither managed, dismissed cheaply in their respective losing semi-finals which meant that the landmark continues to belong to India’s batting icon.

As a consolation, Sharma now holds the record for most hundreds in a single World Cup tournament with his five centuries to better Sri Lanka’s Kumar Sangakkara four at the 2015 World Cup.

With the ball, Mitchell Starc emerged with 29 wickets, to break fellow-Aussie Glenn McGrath’s standing record of 28 scalps at a single ICC World Cup.

All in all, it was a tournament that saw the four best squads contesting the semi-finals, from where the two winners carried on to do battle for the glittering World Cup trophy at Lord’s.

And finally, it needed an extraordinary twist of events to decide who would be the champions on a sunny London evening at the spiritual Mecca of cricket.

Also read: Celebrating Rohit ‘Hitman’ Sharma’s fabulous World Cup five