I think the main problem was that the same teams seemed to play each other five times.
In the end the final finished in chaos and more importantly in darkness, due to a cock up by the officials, harsher critics than me have said this was a fitting end to the tournament. You would have thought that since the competition had gone on so long they could have allowed the game to continue into a second day, after all it was the World Cup Final!!! Having said that common sense and sporting officialdom have rarely been ideal bedfellows.
Having waited 7 weeks it was a bit of a shame that the outcome was somewhat predictable, i.e. the best team, Australia, went on to win the World cup in quite convincing fashion. I suppose in the final we did see one of the best one day innings ever from Adam Gilchrist.
Other highlights of the tournament, were as follows: Herschelle Gibbs scoring 6 sixes in one over, although it was against the Dutch so it doesn't really count. Sri Lanka's Malinga taking
four wickets in four balls at the death of a match. And Burmuda's, Dwayne Leverock, showing the world you can make it to a major sporting event, despite an obvious disadvantage and I don't mean coming from Burmuda. (see pic)
From a personal point of view the tournament was a disappointment. This is beacause my parents are from the Caribbean and I was born in this country so when it comes to cricket I support the West Indies and England both of whom were crap! I'm now desperately searching to see if I have Australian heritage or at very least Sri Lankan.
England failed to get going and limped out of the tournament, in other countries this would have prompted the burning of effigies of the players and coaching staff, but in this country we just rang up Talksport and complained. To be fair we're probably used to failure what with our plentiful supply of sporting disasters. People often say if there was an Olympics for underage pregnancies and underage drinking we'd win gold, but I reckon we'd muck up, all of a sudden our kids would become teetotal and start using precautions or worse just abstain from sex.
The tournament also saw the end of 2 greats of the game Brian Lara and Glenn McGrath. I knew Lara had retired bacause all the commentators started calling him by his full name Brian Charles Lara, so if you hear people calling me Julian Argonaut Daniel don't expect to see me on the stage again.
We mustn't forget Freddie Flintoff's Pedalo incident, cleverly nicknamed 'Fredalo', where he got wasted less than 36hrs before a game and overturned a Pedalo at sea. He got stripped as vice captain and made to apologise to a room of journalists, where he said something along the lines of "You're my beshtest friend..... I love you I do, did I ever tell you I love you".
And finally, this World Cup also saw the murder of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer. Because this happened in the same week as Freddie's antics, some media types tried to lump the 2 things together and say 'this has been the worse week ever for cricket'. I'm sure most if not all people will agree Freddie was out of order but a young man getting trolleyed is not in the same ball park as a murder. Well not in my world.
See you in 4 yrs time.
Julian
R.I.P Bob Woolmer
Cricket World Cup Final