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The Best Side To Never Win A World Cup
Manage episode 379768921 series 3442172
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With his heavy bat, Klusener hit thousands and thousands of balls in the 1999 World Cup in England. He was trying to achieve many things with this ritual, but mainly to groove his muscle memory and calm his nerves. ‘I needed to know how hard to hit it to get over the ropes – how much to get on it to get it to where it needed to go,’ he says.
Sometimes he would obsessively repeat the ritual time and time again, but at other times it would feel so good there would be no need and he wouldn’t want to break the spell he was in. ‘If I was in the zone and hitting well, I could be hitting with Fordie and he’d throw me five and everything would be great. He’d just look at me and we’d pack up because we knew that everything was perfect. Sometimes I’d opt out of those optional practices because I was in good shape. If I was in a good space I just wanted to stay in it.’
The rest of the team was in a similarly good space. They were more experienced than the 1996 side, more streetwise and as well, if not better, prepared, having stressed that they were out to enjoy themselves at a pre-tournament camp in Swellendam. They certainly came into the tournament against a backdrop of significant wins at a variety of venues in the preceding seasons.
They had won the Wills Golden Jubilee Tournament in Pakistan in 1997; won gold in the 1998 Commonwealth Games, beating a strong Australian side in the final; and won the inaugural ICC Knock Out Tournament (now the Champions Trophy), beating the West Indies in Bangladesh in the final, Jacques Kallis scoring a match-winning century.
Klusener sums up the prevailing atmosphere pithily: ‘We pretty much had all the boxes ticked – we went in [to the World Cup] really believing we could do it.’ His was a widely held view.
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