England: Jumping The Shark Since '79

In June 1979, I went with my dad to Lord's to watch England play West Indies in the World Cup final. It was the second edition of the tournament, West Indies having won the first with a hundred from Clive Lloyd. They would win this one with a century from Viv Richards, but their total owed its impetus to Collis King, who played one of the great forgotten innings in the history of the game, 86 from 66 deliveries.

That total? West Indies made 286 from from their 60 overs. It seemed then, at the halfway point of the 74th one-day international ever played, a vast score, a forbidding, ice-laden mountain that England could not climb, indeed that no team might scale. And so against Roberts, Holding, Croft and Garner, England's openers, Mike Brearley and Geoffrey Boycott reached 129 in 38 overs, leaving the other frontline batsmen, Randall, Gooch, Gower, Botham and Larkins, 158 from the remaining 22.

It all feels like a long time ago, the images of both sides all in white - Packer's 'circus', with its 'coloured clothes' and its vulgar floodlights, was still a dirty phrase around these parts - as Joel Garner established the eternal value of the yorker, pinging England out for the addition of just 65 runs. The Almanack sounded vaguely gobsmacked too, describing Collis King's innings as 'an amazing display' and Richards as 'the hero of the day'. We went home in the haze of a warm evening and didn't really worry too much more about it. Was it 'proper' cricket or not? No-one seemed quite sure.

Turns out it was, and England were already up against it. Although the maths and stats of that day seem arcane - 158 from 22 overs with nine wickets in hand? The WASP would be buzzing - the ambivalence towards it all remains. As players, pundits and punters tear each other apart after India's 3-1 win, now, as much as ever, we look at the limited overs game through the eyes of those who existed way before it.

A win in Friday's final match was welcome, but as meaningless as any in the 3,451 ODIs that have followed that long-ago day at Lord's. England's current methodology is from around the mid 2000s of that number; they're still quite excited to score 290, and still quite daunted by the pusuit of it. The rest of cricket, meanwhile, roars on into a future that is being written from the bottom up - through T20 into the 50 over game - rather than the top down.

The arguments don't need repeating: you can read them anywhere. It's interesting though to consider exactly how much England have changed since 1979, psychologically and philosophically. The answer is, not as much as you'd think. I'll believe they are serious about winning any kind of ICC tournament when they clear a window for the IPL and join in with the rest of the world at last.

NB: That window doesn't need to undermine the primacy of Test cricket, which will become greater by becoming slightly more rare. Seventeen Tests in a year post-World Cup is less about commitment to form than to TV deals, cricketing realpolitik and finance.