In writ­ing this col­umn, the 24th match in the World Cup has just been played. Are you miss­ing the West In­dies? I cer­tain­ly am not. I am more re­laxed watch­ing the games and to be hon­est, for me, it mat­ters not who wins.

How­ev­er, I must ad­mit that I get con­sid­er­able joy when the so-called min­nows beat up the es­tab­lished crick­et­ing na­tions.

The way runs are be­ing scored by the bats­men with to­tals more than 300, could you imag­ine the West In­dies bowlers be­ing put to the sword by the op­po­si­tion? I of­ten won­der how the likes of Hold­ing, Roberts, Croft, and Gar­ner think when watch­ing most of these bowlers from around the world be­ing bat­tered to all parts of the field.

Speak­ing about those for­mer great West In­di­an fast bowlers, I lis­tened to a can­did in­ter­view with for­mer leg­endary In­di­an open­ing bats­man Sunil Gavaskar dur­ing one of the games. He was asked who was the most dif­fi­cult bowler he had faced, and with­out hes­i­ta­tion, he said Andy Roberts be­cause of his va­ri­ety and al­so be­cause he had the knack to come back to bowl with a ball 50 to 60 overs old and pro­duce an un­playable de­liv­ery.

Roberts was my favourite as well. He al­ways looked as if he was ready for bat­tle, but un­for­tu­nate­ly, you don’t see that with many of the faster bowlers to­day ex­cept some­one like Alzarri Joseph, whom I wish would, if he hasn’t gone al­ready, spend a week with Roberts and see what hap­pens af­ter the week.

The World Cup is turn­ing out to be very in­ter­est­ing in­deed. In ad­di­tion to lots of runs be­ing scored, we have seen a few up­sets in the tour­na­ment. As I write, the de­fend­ing cham­pi­ons, Eng­land, are sec­ond to last in the ta­ble, with on­ly Bangladesh be­low them. A week ago, I had said the win­ner should come from the Big Six of In­dia, New Zealand, Aus­tralia, South Africa, Pak­istan, and Eng­land.

Eng­land is mak­ing life very dif­fi­cult for them­selves, and with one more de­feat, they may not even get in­to the se­mi-fi­nal stage. They still have to play In­dia and Aus­tralia and to be frank, I can’t see them win­ning both of those en­coun­ters, so even if they win four match­es and lose one, they will end up with ten points. In­dia is al­ready on ten points, and both South Africa and New Zealand have 8, and since they have to play one an­oth­er, one will ad­vance to ten points, and al­though South Africa ar­guably has a more dif­fi­cult run-in, with re­main­ing match­es against Pak­istan, New Zealand, In­dia and Afghanistan, I can’t see them not get­ting at least 4 points from their last four games to qual­i­fy for the se­mi-fi­nals.

Some­how, they con­jured up a way to lose to the Nether­lands, and maybe it was com­pla­cen­cy, but the Pro­teas still have the best net run rate of all the teams at 2.37, and that could, in the end, be a sig­nif­i­cant ad­van­tage for them.

From their open­ing game against Sri Lan­ka, which brought about a trio of cen­turies, in­clud­ing the fastest ever in a World Cup match by Aiden Markram, their bats­men, apart from their game against the Nether­lands, have been in scin­til­lat­ing form. Quin­ton de Kock, with 3 cen­turies and Hein­rich Klaasen’s stroke­play, has been stun­ning. South Africa’s bowlers—Kag­iso Raba­da, Ger­ald Co­et­zee, and Mar­co Jansen- sup­port each oth­er and take wick­ets at op­por­tune times. At this stage of the tour­na­ment, I like the look of them. My ques­tion is, will they choke when it mat­ters, or just have a bad game?

New Zealand lost to In­dia but gave it a good fight. They are miss­ing Kane Williamson for the big games as he is the dif­fer­ence with them, scor­ing 273 as op­posed to 325. They pos­sess a good bowl­ing at­tack, but I be­lieve that if they bat first against the ‘Big 6’, they need to score at least 300 to win the game, but they should be head­ing to the se­mi-fi­nals.

As I pre­dict­ed, In­dia is the favourite to win the World Cup, and they are play­ing ex­act­ly like that. They hu­mil­i­at­ed Aus­tralia and Pak­istan, bowl­ing them out for less than 200 runs and win­ning the games with overs to spare.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, they have bat­ted sec­ond in all five games. We will have to wait and see when they bat first how they will ap­proach the in­nings, hav­ing to set a tar­get rather than pac­ing them­selves in chas­ing a score. But, they still look good to win it with the fire­pow­er they pos­sess in their bowl­ing line-up, par­tic­u­lar­ly Jasprit Bum­rah.

Aus­tralia should be the fourth team in the se­mi-fi­nals. Af­ter los­ing their open­ing games against In­dia and South Africa, they now seem to be play­ing more to their po­ten­tial by de­feat­ing Sri Lan­ka, Pak­istan, and the Nether­lands was not too much of a dif­fi­cult task, with Glenn Maxwell scor­ing the fastest World Cup 100 in just 40 balls eclips­ing the record set by Mack­ram by nine balls and record­ing the 4th fastest ODI 100. They still have New Zealand, and the game with Eng­land could very well be a de­cider as to who fills that 4th se­mi-fi­nal spot.

Pak­istan is so un­pre­dictable; you nev­er know which Pak­istan team will turn up on the day. How­ev­er, just like Eng­land, the stun­ning loss to Afghanistan would have put paid to their chances of get­ting in­to the fi­nal four.

I have al­ways com­pared Pak­istan to the West In­dies as they could beat any­one on their day, but on an off day, they could lose to Rosary Boys RC.

Afghanistan has giv­en its sup­port­ers a re­al roller coast­er ride. Hav­ing lost the open­ing game to Bangladesh (maybe they weren’t match-ready), their vic­to­ries against Eng­land and Pak­istan and the Nether­lands’s de­feat of South Africa were the tour­na­ment’s vic­to­ries.

Chas­ing 282 against Pak­istan and on­ly los­ing 2 wick­ets in get­ting to the tar­get was su­perb, and then re­strict­ing Eng­land to 215 was a phe­nom­e­nal per­for­mance.

An­oth­er high­light of the World Cup was when the Nether­lands re­strict­ed the pow­er­ful South African bat­ting line-up to stop them from get­ting 246 in 43 overs.

It is heart­en­ing to see the small­er crick­et­ing na­tions caus­ing some up­sets but does that mean those na­tions like Afghanistan, Nether­lands, and to a less­er ex­tent, Bangladesh are im­prov­ing year by year and will be slug­ging it out toe-toe-to-toe in the next few years with mighty Eng­land, Aus­tralia etc?

Where does that leave the West In­dies? Crick­et lovers can on­ly hope that they will not be left be­hind be­cause, as it stands now, un­less some­thing dras­tic hap­pens to West In­dies crick­et and the evo­lu­tion of the play­ers in the re­gion, they could very well be still watch­ing on the side­lines for the next few years and think­ing what could have been.