BackThe closest World Cup finals in history
A look back at the most exciting finals, and some of the tamest
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After a month and a half, cricket’s most important tournament, the World Cup, is finally reaching its climax with the final between hosts Australia and New Zealand. It’s now useful to provide a bit of historical context and a look at the closest finals in the cup’s history.
Of the last 10 World Cup finals, the team batting first has won the match seven times. For these matches, gauging the closeness is simply a matter of looking at how close the opposition came to chasing down the target. Looked at this way, the most riveting World Cup final has to be the 1987 between Australia and England in Kolkata, with Australia winning by just seven runs. At 170 runs, when the fourth wicket fell, the English innings was following the same path as the Australians, who lost their fourth wicket for 168 runs. After that the English innings lost steam, losing four more wickets (two each to Alan Border and Steve Waugh) and failing to reach their target.
The accompanying graph shows all the finals where the winning side has batted first and the scores set by the winning team along with the score the opposition managed to reach.
The most one-sided World Cup final was the hammering India took at the hands of Australia in 2003. Australia scored a mammoth 359 for the loss of only two wickets, and bowled India out for 234. Ricky Ponting was at his deadly best, unbeaten at 140 of 121 balls. In the Indian innings, apart from Sehwag (82) and Dravid (47), no batsman scored more than 25.
For matches where the winning side was chasing, it’s more useful to look at run rates, an indication of how comfortably the winning side was able to chase the target. Of the three instances, the closest match, where the run rates of the two sides were most similar, was the 2011 final between India and Sri Lanka. However, it must be noted that in all three instances, the side chasing had a number of wickets and several balls in hand, so they weren’t ever under any great pressure. The most comfortable World Cup final chase was in 1999, where Australia easily chased Pakistan’s total of 132 in just 20.1 overs.
Most World Cup finals have been one-sided affairs. Here’s hoping for a cracker of a match on Sunday.
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