What a humdinger of a game. In the modern era of bat-dominated limited-overs cricket came this scintillating match with a heart-stopping finish brought about by the sterling performances of fast bowlers on either side.
Enjoying conditions that suited sheer fast bowling, Trent Boult destroyed Australia after Tim Southee and Daniel Vettori had given the breakthroughs. The Aussies came back into the small scoring game with a fine exhibition of swinging, toe-crushing yorkers from Mitchell Starc.
The last gasp win was in some ways a tribute to the spirit of New Zealand that has been such a feature of the start of this World Cup as much as India’s revival.
Twenty-three years ago, Martin Crowe startled the cricket world and the World Cup with astonishing new tactics of slow bowlers bowling the new ball and opening batsmen dancing out of the crease to attack fast bowlers.
One of his successors, Brendon McCullum, has refined the tactics of a far more evolved and modern game into an all-out attack battle formation with quick bowlers operating with three slips and a gully and he himself taking on the challenge facing the new ball from the batting crease with the same insouciance as Mark Greatbatch once did to change the approach to limited-overs cricket forever.
The New Zealander McCullum is now being freely acknowledged as the best captain not only at the World Cup but in cricket itself. His use of the Kiwis’ bowling resources is not so much innovative as outright attacking.
He brought on his predecessor and orthodox left arms pinner Daniel Vettori within the first 10 overs and backed him with a short leg and a leg slip and in fact spin helped changed the game after Tim Southee had come back on to break the Warner-Finch opening stand, which had settled the Australian innings down nicely.
It was Trent Boult who sent the Aussies tumbling from 80 for one to 106-9 by simply bowling quick while moving the ball around and if not for a last wicket stand the Aussies were in danger of falling for a lesser total than the Englishmen who were the last to be decimated by the home team.
If the total seemed threatening in conditions conducive for fast bowling, McCullum dismissed it by a mindboggling attack that began on dancing feet challenging the Aussie quicks to come at him.
A desperate Michael Clarke, in his ‘Cricket Waapsi’, even tried leg theory at his counterpart and succeeded to the extent of seeing a Johnson short ball thud into the batsman’s left elbow. Braving that horrible blow, McCullum somehow carried on until one of his gladiatorial hits landed in the hands of wide mid off on the circle.
It must have seemed a breeze from there save that the Kiwi batsmen now stood exposed as Clarke threw caution to the winds with attacking fields and outright attack with the pace of his quickest bowlers although Johnson had been taken apart by the Kiwis.
This was tactically the finest game with both skippers going for the jugular. Only once in about 20 ODIs do we get a game like this which is dominated by the bowlers. It serves as a bright contrast to the clobbering ways of modern bats sending the ball crashing into the stands to provide what modern spectators are used to as the real cricketing excitement.
So dramatic did the match become no one complained that just about 300 runs were scored by both teams combined on a day on which voluble Kiwi fans, who gave the Aussies quite a mouthful, could be forgiven if they felt like taking a quick visit to the cardiologist to check whether their pumping hearts were okay.
