Australia won the World Cup — again. What a yawn-inducing piece of news. They were the favourites, and they won. Let’s get on with it, folks. What’s the big deal?
Serial winners in sport often leave us with the feeling that we’ve been conned into watching a movie that we’ve already seen — same film, just different actors, and a new title. At best, we doff our hats for a moment to the ones that have made winning a habit, at worst we choose to ignore them altogether.
“Everybody pulls for David, nobody roots for Goliath,’’ said the late Wilt Chamberlain, a National Basketball Association superstar who became the first man to score 100 points in a game, playing for Philadelphia Warriors against the New York Knicks on March 2, 1962.
Fifty three years on, little has changed in sport; and you can bet your bottom rupee that nothing will change in the next fifty years.
Rooting for the DavidsFor, the world is full of Davids. It is so much easier for us to identify with the plucky little man out there trying to courageously surmount formidable odds than with men who make domination their everyday business, as if it was their birthright.
Our spirits are lifted when a Balwinder Singh Sandhu (remember him?) ball crashes into a bewildered Gordon Greenidge’s off stump in a World Cup final. The limits of possibility have been stretched — the great opener shouldering arms and giving away his wicket to a man whose favourite tale for his grandchildren might be that single moment alone.
When underdogs take flight, we feel as if we are soaring along with them into stratospheric heights. There is something about the metamorphosis of the little man into a giant-killer that is at once thrilling and heart-lifting.
This is precisely why Kapil Devils (1983) will always be greater heroes than Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s 2011 World Cup winning side. Kapil’s men started as 66-1 outsiders and played away from home in difficult conditions while Dhoni’s boys played at home and were expected to deliver.
But consider for a moment the demands that are made on the best, and what it takes for the best to remain the best time after time.
Sunday marked the end of the 11th World Cup. And five of those have been won by men from a single country where cricket may not even be the most popular sport anymore.
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place,” wrote Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass . And when the same place happens to be Mount Everest, you can imagine how often the occupants would be gasping for air.
There is no single athletic algorithm for greatness, no highway through a readily accessible route; every great team finds its own way, employs its own formula, to get the job done.
If Allan Border’s men did it in tough sub-continental conditions in 1987, then Michael Clarke’s side carried the burden of being favourites admirably and performed for the most part in a state of affectless calm.
Authoritarian mindsetThe amazing thing about serial winners is, where lesser men see threats, they see wonderful new opportunities. With a commandingly authoritarian mindset, they seem to find an infinitely renewable supply of confidence, energy and resources.
Fifteen years ago, on the centre court at Wimbledon, Pete Sampras was being outmatched by the gifted, handsome Australian, Pat Rafter, in the early stages of the final. Down a set, Sampras was trailing 2-5 in the second set tiebreak.
“What was going through your mind then,” Sampras was asked after he had hit a second serve ace at a critical point and went on to win the tiebreak and the match (in four sets).
Sampras’s answer was revealing. He simply said, “nothing,” meaning he wasn’t thinking about anything at all, least of all about the possibility of losing.
Great players and teams can accomplish that — just stay in the moment, in a sort of Zen zone, and embrace success and surpassing glory. Successive Australian teams have shown that they have this quality too.
In the carnivalesque atmosphere of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, after losing a toss that might have sapped the spirits of lesser teams, Clarke’s men played with such monolithic focus that it would have been a surprise if the match had been any less lopsided.
Nothing capsulised their near-mystical self-belief as did Mitchell Starc’s opening over, the fifth ball of which torpedoed the most-feared player in the New Zealand side — Brendon McCullum, the Kiwi captain.
The match was won and lost there, in the very first over. Despite a 100-plus partnership between Ross Taylor and Grant Elliott, there was never any doubt that it was going to be Australia’s day.
After all, serial winners have the secret to success lodged in their DNA, even as they reshape our perceptions of the possible and the impossible.
