Month: September 2023

In the countdown to the highly anticipated 2023 ICC Men’s ODI World Cup, cricket enthusiasts around the globe are buzzing with excitement. With just days left until the grand tournament kicks off, all eyes are on the ten formidable teams set to battle it out for the ultimate glory. Hosts and World No. 1 ODI team, India, are naturally considered as strong contenders for the coveted title. However, they face stiff competition from a slew of cricketing powerhouses, including defending champions England, five-time champions Australia, and the ever-dangerous Pakistan
Cricket, often hailed as a batter’s paradise, tends to tip the scales in favour of the big hitters. However, amidst these preconceived notions, there emerges a select group of bowlers who have defied the odds and wreaked havoc upon batters with their unmatched bowling prowess. Recently, former South African speedster Dale Steyn took the liberty of selecting his top five speedsters poised to make a significant impact in the ICC World Cup 2023. 
Steyn has picked the top 5 bowlers who could wreak havoc on the batters in the World Cup. The first on his list is India speedster Mohammed Siraj, who caught the cricketing world’s attention with his dazzling performance in the Asia Cup 2023 final against Sri Lanka. The second is Kagiso Rabada, a South African sensation who finds himself on Steyn’s list thanks to his blistering pace and crafty variations. Third up is Shaheen Shah Afridi, the dynamic Pakistani speedster, who has made it clear that his sole mission is to disrupt the top-order batters and create relentless pressure.
The fourth to fetch a place in the 40-year-olds list is Trent Boult, the Kiwi pacer known for causing mayhem to the Indian top order during the 2019 World Cup Semi-Final; earned a spot in Steyn’s lineup, and the final berth is filled by Mark Wood, the English sensation, who strikes terror into the hearts of batsmen with his blistering pace and impeccable line and length.
Also check: Most Wickets in ODI World Cup 2023

Mirabai Chanu looked at the bar. The weight next to it read 117kg. She spread her palms around the bar and squatted. A pause and the bar was on her collar bones. Then she just crumbled, falling down and lying on her side, bar dropping in front of her. The TV screen cut off to show her competitors backstage but behind them one could see Chanu being carried away by one of India’s coaching staff.
At that point her total read 191kg: 83kg in the snatch and 108kg in the clean and jerk (C&J), placing her fourth. In bronze medal position, Thailand’s Thanyathon Sukcharoen had lifted 199kg. Chanu had been aiming to overtake her with that 117kg.
Instead, she ended the Asian Games in fourth place, no medal.
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There was something different from the off about the reigning Olympic silver medalist, and not in a good way. Normally, Mirabai walks on to the weightlifting platform shoulders held high, head up, stride purposeful. She knows what she wants, and she goes and gets it. On Saturday, at Hangzhou, that walk was anything but. The shoulders looked tight, the head bowed, the stride betraying nerves.
The difference was even starker on the mat, and that was evident even before the mighty fall on her last lift.
In the snatch, traditionally her weaker event (a more technical lift, where you have to lift the bar clean above your head in one motion), she started with an 83kg and then that’s where it stayed. In her second attempt, she lifted it above her head while in the squat before her left wrist appeared to buckle. In her third, she barely made it above her head before she rolled it behind her, her shoulder blades rotating in an awkward looking manner.
Mirabai Chanu’s Asiad drought continued with injury due to an unsuccessful lift in the 49kg weightlifting event at the 19th Asian Games, Hangzhou. AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi
There had been reports from the venue that she was struggling with a thigh injury, but she marched out for the clean and jerk (the event in which she held the world record till earlier this month) and started with a lift of 108kg. That was a clean lift, but in her second, she could barely lift the bar to her collarbones in the first move, her wrists buckling, the bar dropping again. Then came that third lift.
Her performance in the competition wasn’t too much of a surprise, though, if you’d been following her closely. Mirabai hasn’t been at her best ever since winning silver at the World Championships 2022, but that tournament itself had hinted at a bigger issue. Her left wrist had buckled mid-lift in Bogota too, and her recovery from it — walking a couple of steps forward before stabilizing and then lifting it — had been pure athletic brilliance. But Hangzhou today showed there the problem hadn’t been fixed.
In the Asian Championships, in May this year, she lifted 194kg (94kg + 113kg) and finished sixth after skipping her last two attempts at C&J. Earlier this month, she had gone to the World Championships, weighed in, given an entry weight, and packed her bags.
The thing is, though, even if she’d been at her best, she’d have struggled on Saturday. The Asian Games was always going to be a difficult tournament to medal in: In fact, India’s last lifting Asiad medal came in 1998 (Karnam Malleswari’s bronze), and this class of 2023 was stacked. Gold medalist Ri Songgum was defending champion and broke both the combined and C&J world records en-route lifting 216 (124). Silver medalist Jiang Huihua is a four-time world champion, and she’d been the one who had taken the C&J world record away from Mirabai last month. They both shattered records, and the minds of those watching, in their battle for 1-2.
For Mirabai, having finished ninth in 2014 (where she lifted 171kg combined) and having missed the 2018 Games due to a back injury, this had been her chance to rubber-stamp her credentials as arguably modern India’s greatest lifter. But the dream, at least today, left her a crumpled figure in the arms of her coach.

England vs Ireland, World Cup, Bangalore, 2011
Ireland won by three wickets
Ah next morning none of the experts gave us the slightest chanceThey said that the English team would lead us on a merry danceAh with their Union Jacks all them English fans, for victory they were setUntil Ray Houghton got the ball and he stuck it in the net- “Joxer Goes to Stuttgart,” Christy Moore
There’s a bit of history to sporting encounters between Ireland and England. When the Republic qualified for their first major football tournament, the 1988 European Championships, their opening match was against England. A 1-0 win at the Neckarstadion, thanks to Ray Houghton’s header, still retains its place in Irish folklore.
The game was memorialised by singer Christy Moore in “Joxer Goes to Stuttgart”, a comic ballad that depicts the convoys of Irish fans making their way to Germany, questions around team selection, and the game itself. Also mentioned is another Irish folk song “Revenge for Skibbereen”, a reference to the Irish famine of the 19th century. The other kind of history.
All of which might seem a long way from Bangalore and the seventh game in Group B of the 2011 World Cup. Ireland, whose cricket team is made up of players from the north and south of the island, had met England twice before at ICC events (both times in Guyana, coincidentally) and won neither – although rain prevented them from having a tilt at chasing 121 at the 2010 T20 World, Cup a tournament England would go on to win.
“You know when you sense the momentum swing and you see that tension leave the room – there’s always a moment where you kind of feel, ‘We’ve got a good chance here'”John Mooney
Ahead of the game at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Cricket Ireland got Houghton – the hero of ’88 – to record a message of encouragement for the team. And so it was that on the way to the ground in the morning, as he sat with his headphones on, watching the sights flit by out of the window of the coach, John Mooney decided to put on something that would help provide “that little bit of extra motivation”.
“I can’t remember what I was listening to at the time, but I definitely changed it for that day. I played a few Irish songs and one of them was ‘Joxer Goes to Stuttgart’.”
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Spoiler alert: Ireland won the game in Bangalore. Their feat in hunting down a target of 328 with five balls to spare remains a World Cup record for the highest successful chase, as does Kevin O’Brien’s 50-ball hundred, which eclipsed the previous fastest by a full 16 deliveries. Allrounder Mooney was the man who hit the winning runs, as Ireland completed a three-wicket upset that remains as unfathomable today as it was then. “It’s almost like I never played another game of cricket in my career here in Ireland because it’s such a big, big thing,” Mooney laughs.
While England were deep in a frankly embarrassing run of ODI World Cups that stretched from 1996 to 2015, they were expected to deal with Ireland easily enough. Andrew Strauss’ side had been run uncomfortably close by Netherlands in their opening game but then pulled off a thrilling tie against India, the eventual champions, at the Chinnaswamy. Ireland, meanwhile, limped to defeat against Bangladesh – a game the Irish had been fixated on in the build-up as “winnable”.
Kevin O’Brien still holds the record for the fastest hundred in a men’s ODI World Cup match. The next best is by Glenn Maxwell, off 51 balls vs Sri Lanka in the 2015 edition
Kirsty Wigglesworth / © Associated Press
England were not supposed to be in the same category, but that consequently served to loosen up the players. “Because we hadn’t really focused so much on it, I’m not gonna say a free hit, but it was – playing against England, it’s a World Cup, let’s go out and win it,” Mooney said. “Or at least put in a really good performance to show that we deserve to be here.”
A routine result still seemed very much on the cards when England piled up 327 for 8 – though things could have been worse: Mooney took four-for and only 70 runs were scored from the last ten overs. Ireland then lost a wicket on the first ball of their reply, before stumbling to 111 for 5 roughly halfway through the innings. Prospects for the boys in green were looking far from rosy as the pink-topped O’Brien, his hair dyed in aid of a cancer charity, set about his innings.
“There were stages in the game when we didn’t play so well, and then there were other stages when we played really well,” Mooney says. “But it was only when the pressure really got off us that we got ourselves back into the game.”
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“I know the exact moment. It’s so clear in my mind when it was.”
Ireland’s hopes quickly coalesced around the burly frame of O’Brien, a powerful hitter whose one previous ODI century – 142 off 125 balls against Kenya – had come four years earlier. O’Brien walked in at No. 6 and might have been dismissed second ball, had England posted a slip – a hard-handed drive at Graeme Swann flying away for four. No matter, Swann struck again in his next over, Gary Wilson trapped lbw for the spinner’s third wicket.
What happened next was scarcely credible. With Alex Cusack slipstreaming O’Brien, the sixth-wicket pair ransacked 162 runs from 103 balls, hitting seven sixes and 15 fours to turn the game on its head. And despite England’s seemingly dominant position, it did not take long for the mood in the ground to change. O’Brien took a brace of fours off Michael Yardy in the 26th over and then twice slog-swept Swann into the fence at deep midwicket – a moment Mooney remembers clearly.
Ahead of the game at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Cricket Ireland got footballer Ray Houghton to record a message of encouragement for the cricket team
“When Kevy hit the second six off Swann, I remember Trent Johnston was sitting just inside the door [of the dressing room]. I walked past TJ and I gave him a little bit of a tap on the shoulder and said, ‘We’ve got a chance here, we definitely have a chance.’ I went to the toilet, came back out and started watching the game and it just unfolded from there. You know when you sense the momentum swing and you see that tension leave the room – you’re watching a run chase, watching a close game, there’s always a moment where you kind of feel, ‘We’ve got a good chance here.'”
Swann had just sent down his ninth over off the reel and would be bowled out by the 29th – a move which, in Mooney’s view, suggested England thought the game was won. “The rest of the bowlers were coming in off an Ashes series, tired, [Stuart] Broad was hobbling around the place. They were really good bowlers, Broad, [James] Anderson, [Tim] Bresnan, but in Indian conditions they weren’t going to offer the same threat as someone like Swann.
“I think it was a tactical mistake from England, and I think it worked out in our favour.”
A flat swivel-pull for six off Anderson took O’Brien to a 30-ball half-century. Bresnan was dispatched over cover, then Anderson manhandled again, the ball travelling 102 metres over midwicket. Another towering blow off Bresnan took O’Brien into the 90s, before England’s wounds were salted by a dropped catch at long-off. A nudge for two off Yardy created history, and although Cusack was run out at the non-striker’s end in the next over, Ireland’s momentum was now unstoppable.
Mooney took up the fight, cuffing an unbeaten 33 from 30 as England’s last hopes unravelled. A tiring O’Brien ran himself out with 11 needed but Mooney finished the job. It was the moment he had been waiting for.
The finishing touch: John Mooney sent a James Anderson delivery to the midwicket boundary to seal the momentous chase
Aijaz Rahi / © Associated Press
“Kevin had played in these conditions, although not at this level, loads of times. We’d won games of cricket batting together at the death for Ireland, in big games before this. So it was weird, but I wasn’t surprised to be in the situation I was in. In fact, when I walked out to bat, I remember saying to Kev, I can’t wait for this to be the last over. It was like, we’ve done this before.”
O’Brien and his incongruous dye job had secured their place in Irish sporting folklore, as had the tattooed man o’war Mooney. And while that night in Bangalore may not quite have the same cut through with the general public as Stuttgart ’88 – as Mooney puts it, “cricket’s a complicated issue over here in Ireland” – the achievement was put into context by a conversation with another footballing hero, Patrick “Packie” Bonner, the goalkeeper whose famous penalty shootout save against Romania took Ireland through to the quarter-finals of the 1990 World Cup.
“It was a great performance,” Mooney says. “We mentioned Ray Houghton and one of the big moments in Irish sport. What we did that night was right up there with that. For me it’s such a proud moment, there’s nothing that can ever take away what happened I spoke to Packie Bonner afterwards – we were at a few events and things. Packie Bonner was the MC and interviewing people, and we were chatting. I said, ‘Packie, I’ll never forget where I was when you saved that peno at the World Cup”, and he turned around and said, ‘Well, it’s the same, because I’ll never forget where I was when you hit winning runs for Ireland.’ There’s no amount of money or nothing in the world that could pay for a comment like that.”
From Houghton to Bonner to O’Brien and Mooney, and one of cricket’s greatest games. Joxer would be proud.
Alan Gardner is a deputy editor at ESPNcricinfo. @alanroderick
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