What the World Cup means

The first cricket World Cup was played over a miraculously rainless English fortnight in 1975 and concluded at 8.43pm on the summer solstice. To the great West Indian commentator Tony Cozier, remembering the event four decades later in The Cricket Monthly, “the most vivid are not so much the outstanding matches and individual performances, as plentiful as they were, as the typically joyous, uninhibited celebrations of thousands of immigrant West Indians at Lord’s and The Oval, in the very heart of London’s Caribbean community.” For West Indians, who only really become a nation for the sake of cricket, those scenes of jubilation, as Cozier knew too well, were something deeper than love of a good fete. They were, in the World Cup’s first shot, what the World Cup means. His captain Virat Kohli took eloquent aim at the trolls: “Attacking someone over their religion is the most, I would say, pathetic thing that a human being can do.” For all the bleed-blue type hashtagging, if the Jasprit or two Mohammads who comprise our magnificent pace attack make a costly mistake or suffer a critical off-day, they know what’s coming. It means something that the South Africa captain at the World Cup is Temba Bavuma, a thoughtful black African, rather than the more experienced but blithely entitled Quinton de Kock, who once felt so exercised in having to make the anti-racism gesture of taking a knee along with his team mates – in a South Africa v West Indies match, at that!