Andrew Strauss looks on as the scoreboard signals a four
© AFP

The Zaltzmeister

The Grand Prix on a donkey

 The first in a new mini-series on classic World Cup rivalries: England's batting v progress

Andy Zaltzman  |  

International cricket is defined by its recurring rivalries, carved into the sport's consciousness over time, renewed and evolved with increasing regularity by the unquenchable fixturelust of the calendar.

Furthermore, one of the benefits of cricket being a sport with relatively limited international reach is that, in World Cups, it is highly likely that these traditional adversaries will meet. Particularly when that sport has become obsessively hell-bent on elongating its showpiece tournament beyond the natural attention span of even the most dedicated fan. Since 1992, India and Pakistan have faced each other in five out of six cricket World Cups, and they will confront each other again, at least once (with, no doubt, an elegant moderation of hype), in 2015. In the same period, Argentina and Brazil have never met in football's equivalent.

However, even those two legendary sporting rivalries pale into insignificance alongside one of the World Cup's signature confrontations of recent decades - England's batting versus the Concept of Progress.

Perhaps this quadrennial showdown has been too one-sided to be considered a truly great rivalry. England have very much been the Andy Roddick to the Concept of Progress' Roger Federer. Nevertheless, the sheer bloody-mindedness that English cricket has shown to persist in taking on its patently superior opponent has lent the series an epic grandeur that curious bystanders and interested neutrals must surely admire.

As the art of limited-over batsmanship has transformed, England have stood on the coastline of convention, barking Canute-like defiance as the waves of change lapped around their ears and the seaweed of statistics clung soggily to their socks.

ODI cricket became a regular feature of the international calendar in the post-Packer season of 1979-80 (prior to that, there had been a total of just 45 non-World-Cup ODIs in the first nine years of the format's existence). In the first three World Cups of what we might therefore consider the ODI era (1983, 1987 and 1992), England scored at 4.71 runs per over; the other Test nations (Australia, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and West Indies) collectively managed 4.46. England were the pacesetters in World Cup batting.

Their problem since then has been that they have continued to set the pace. That exact same pace. In the five World Cups since 1992, the other top-eight teams (the above, plus South Africa) have increased their run rate markedly, to 5.18. England's has been almost unchanged, at 4.74.

England have often given off the air of an unabashed traditionalist entering a "Who Can Send the Most Emails in 15 Minutes" competition armed with a typewriter

To illustrate further quite how unsuccessful England's batsmen have been in World Cups, consider this statistic. In the list of the 100 fastest-scoring batsmen in World Cups since 1992 (with a qualification minimum of 150 runs), only two are Englishmen. The rule-proving exceptions are Paul Nixon (31st place, 193 runs in 2007, strike rate 99.48) and Andrew Strauss (43rd, 334 runs in 2011, strike rate 93.55).

It has been an almost heroic tale of prolonged batting Ludditism. England's default recipe for success - Test-style accumulation with occasional blasts of power - has produced only an inedibly stodgy porridge of failure. Their many batting technicians have generally struggled, and their few sluggers have failed.

They have often given off the air of a die-hard old-school racer insisting on driving a Grand Prix on a donkey; or an unabashed traditionalist entering a "Who Can Send the Most Emails in 15 Minutes" competition armed only with a typewriter.

Their 2011 exit was perhaps the anti-zenith of English World Cup batting, with all due respect to 1996 (where their five specialist batsmen combined to score 86 runs off 158 balls in the quarter-final defeat to Sri Lanka), 1999 (knocked out on net run rate after dawdling in comfortable victories), 2003 (slowest run rate of any Test nation apart from Bangladesh), and 2007 (all out for 154 in 48 overs in the decisive match against South Africa).

Four years ago they were again eliminated in the quarter-final by Sri Lanka, after smiting a dismal 12 fours and zero sixes in 50 grim overs of straight-batted, straitjacketed strokelessness. The Concept of Progress was starting to look bored by the ease with which it was winning.

England seemed to have set their hearts on another contest with their old foe in 2015, but the jolting dismissal of Alastair Cook was perhaps the first true sign that England might even sidestep their regular showdown with Progress and attempt to embrace the big-scoring, boundary-blattering, high-risk batsmanship of contemporary ODI cricket.

History, however, suggests that, at some point, old habits will resurface and England will attempt to nudge their way to glory. Perhaps they will even defy precedent and consign the Concept of Progress to a shock defeat. After all, Roddick, after 21 losses in 23 encounters, did end his tennis career riding a glorious one-match winning streak against Federer.

Andy Zaltzman is a stand-up comedian, a regular on BBC Radio 4, and a writer