7 greatest twists in World Cup history

A game which has many twists and turns and ‘goes down to the wire’, as Ravi Shastri puts it, is the ideal game for a spectator. People just love to watch close encounters, and it doesn’t matter whether it is their own team and players facing the heat in the middle. The greatest clashes in the history of the game will have a large number of these closely fought encounters because they give the most amount of joy to the watchers. It is also because of this reason that Twenty20 (T20) cricket has come to be so popular because the game changes in a matter of minutes and it is closely fought more often than not.When there is a World Cup encounter that goes right till the very end, its significance and popularity increases all the more. The stakes are higher than everything else, and only teams which are able to keep their nerve better end up being victorious.On the back of New Zealand’s thrilling one-wicket win over co-hosts Australia in a Pool A clash of the World Cup last week which saw several twists and turns, here are 7 matches with the greatest twists in World Cup history:

#7 South Africa vs England, Sydney, 1992

One of the semi-finals of the 1992 World Cup was played between England and South Africa at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG). England batted first and put on 252 with the help of top-scorer Graeme Hick, who scored 83. Alec Stewart and Neil Fairbrother partnered him for the 3rd and the 4th wicket. He fell when the score was 187, after which the lower middle order added some runs to take the score past 250.

The chase was going haywire until Jonty Rhodes rescued it with a 38-ball 43. Play was stopped when South Africa needed 22 off 13 balls, with Brian McMillan and David Richardson at the crease. What the new rules regarding rain said was that any overs lost would reduce the target in proportion to the lowest run-yielding overs of the side batting first, as opposed to reducing the target according to the run-rate of the side batting first.

This rule, however, did not fit well in the circumstances. With 2.1 overs left in the game, rain interrupted play for 12 minutes, which meant 2 overs were lost. And since South Africa had bowled 2 maidens to England, those two were counted and the target was not slashed at all while the balls were reduced to just the one. McMillan took a single off it, as the crowd looked on in utter disbelief. The two batters walked off bringing an end to South Africa’s inaugural World Cup.