The Polaroids and homemade tattoos of CWC07

Wow, a damn good cricket blog this turned out to be. It’s as if it was swallowed up whole by the Bermuda triangle sometime before the start of the first World Cup semifinal. In a way, it was. Well, not around Bermuda; somewhere near Jamaica, in fact.

Everything was going fine until Jamaica. We had endured the years of anticipation, the months of grudge work and rationing in order to save up for the event, the hellish 45-hour trans-oceanic plane trip, the procession of spare rooms, apartments, hotel rooms and guesthouses across four islands -- not to mention the disproportionate quantity of truly awful cricket games across the six-week-span of the overlong, idiotically-organised tournament. We’d made it through all that, even managing to write about some of it, and were now staring at The End, straight in the face. The Semis and the Final. The last chance for glory, redemption, and maybe, just maybe, justice in the field.

And then… it all went to shit. Logistical problems, a shortage of funds, technical difficulties too mundane to mention; lost notebooks and forgotten pens; weak wireless signals and bad vibes; take your pick. Kingston was an ominously paradoxical shithole -- a sweltering, overcrowded ghost-town, full of low-grade hustlers and unspoken hostility. We couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. Ocho Rios wasn’t much better, but at least it was small enough to let you keep your bearings. We watched the final there, and after it we didn’t feel much like going anywhere or seeing anything, so we stuck around. To decompress before the return home. We didn’t even care that our guesthouse in Ochi was run by a mentally unstable, middle-aged Canadian woman who seemed capable of going on a midnight rum-and-weed binge any day and torching the whole place down.

I think that period was necessary after enduring that apocalyptic bummer of a World Cup final. That was just horrible – truly, truly awful. It was the worst of all possible worlds: Australia winning in statistically convincing fashion, with Glenn McGrath grabbing Player-of-the-Tournament. The status quo was maintained, the rest of the world hadn’t caught up one iota in four years, and McGrath was bowing out to great fanfare with that smug look on his face. That’s the stuff from the vilest kind of third-world malarial nightmare. It still makes me a little sick just to mention it.

It’s fine, though; the mourning period has now passed, and I am quickly building up the reserves of unwarranted idealism, antagonistic bile, and aesthetic liberalism that are needed to immerse oneself into sport again, let alone write about it. But before that, for the sake completeness if nothing else, the missing posts.

I can probably count on one hand the number of people who care about these, but here they are regardless. Unabridged, unadorned (and in blue): the last blog posts leading up to the World Cup final. They were written at the time but not posted, and have sat untouched on my hard drive since. You can go back and read them chronologically, or you could enjoy it Memento-style, starting with the last post and going back in time. I think I prefer it that way; you can watch as bitterness and resignation slowly and magically transform themselves into hope and anticipation. It's not often that we get to see things that way...