The curious World Cup forays of 2 great Test openers - Sunil Gavaskar and Geoffrey Boycott

The Sunny paradox

One of the most inexplicable batting displays came on the very first day of the World Cup in 1975. Sunil Gavaskar, the little master, batted through the 60 overs of the Indian innings and returned unbeaten with 36 in a total of 132 for three, having faced 174 balls.

It was quite a pleasant surprise, then, that this peerless Test opener slammed a century off just 85 balls against New Zealand in 1987. This was at that time the second-fastest century in the World Cup, close behind West Indies skipper Clive Lloyd’s hundred off 82 deliveries in the 1975 final.

This is not the only oddity about Gavaskar’s World Cup forays. Even though he fared disastrously with the bat in the triumphant 1983 campaign, Gavaskar proved to be India’s talisman in the tournament.

He scored a grand total of 59 runs (average 9.83), with a highest score of 25. But he was the team’s lucky mascot as they won all the six matches that he played in, and lost the two in which he did not appear. For good measure, he pocketed the ball after India upset the all-conquering Caribbean giants in the final.

Geoffrey boycotted

Geoff Boycott once held the all-time run-scoring record of 8,114 runs in Test cricket until Gavaskar surpassed him. Boycott, a dour opening batsman obsessed with technique, scored 246 not out in the Leeds Test against India in 1967 and was then dropped from the team for slow scoring.

He went on to face the first ball ever bowled in a ODI match, from Australian Graham Mckenzie at Melbourne on 5 January 1971. He did not play in the first World Cup in 1975 because he felt, it is said, that he should have been England’s captain, and not Mike Denness, who in 2001 became infamous as match referee.

But Boycott was in the 1979 World Cup team even though his opening partner Mike Brearley was skipper. Vivian Richards and Collis King feasted on his ‘tiddly’ bowling in the final, grabbing 38 runs off six overs.

Boycott then combined with Brearley in a leisurely century partnership. Clive Lloyd, of all people, dropped a dolly offered by Boycott, and it was suspected that the West Indies skipper did so deliberately because he was happy to let the pair blissfully bat England out of the match.

The plot ended with Boycott finishing with a more respectable bowling - than batting - record in the World Cup, as his twin strikes clinched a win over Pakistan.

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