Qualities of head and heart are needed to win the Cup !

The South Africans and the Kiwis belted lowly placed opponents on Tuesday as the ICC World Cup 2007 moved closer to the Super Eights stage. Graeme Smith’s side shot out the Scots for 186 and reached the target with 27overs to spare! The Kiwis were in good form too at St Lucia as they set up a mammoth score and then dismissed Kenya for just 183. The clinical efficiency with which Stephen Fleming’s side plays is a lesson to some of the more cavalier teams. But there is more to this.

There are two types of teams in this World Cup. Those that play with the head,
and those that play with the heart. Some teams are lucky to have a combination of both. In my view only Australia has the qualities of both head and heart, which are required to win the Cup. They are best equipped to take home the Cup, despite the recent retirements of Shane Warne, Justin Langer and Damien Martyn. They have players who do their job efficiently without ever setting the stadium on fire, but they also have some really exciting players like Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Andrew Symonds. They are also missing the lightning pace of Brett Lee. Their leading bowler this time remains Glenn McGrath, which is an amazing fact, for he has retained this position in the last 4 editions of the World Cup. Given the fact that he is not getting any younger and that the others are a bit raw, it is probably their bowling which could let them down at some stage of the tournament.

The other main teams can be classified as follows- New Zealand, England,
Zimbabwe fall in the “heads” category. The “hearts” category includes Pakistan, India, the West Indies. About South Africa and Sri Lanka one can say that they are a bit closer to the Aussies, than the others but not enough.

The point being that the “heads” category teams play with the aforementioned
clinical efficiency but do not display the flair required to be world champions. The hearts category can be brilliant one day and infuriatingly abysmal the next. World Cups till now have happily been won by the Aussies, the Windies, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. These teams were not in the least what one could call “boring” sides but at the same time they were methodical enough when it counted. Thus the champion side is the one that manages to perform consistently with flashes of brilliance throughout the Cup. The purely methodical sides may have reached the final, but have never won. Till now ! The reason for all these hypotheses today is that India may crash out on Friday or they may crush the Lankans. I am not willing to go on record to say what will be the result. My heart says they will win, but my head…