Andy Zaltzman's World Cup Memories ‒ Part One of a New One-Part Series

Man versus rhododendron




The rhododendrons breathe a sigh of relief as the axeman turns away from them briefly
© Getty Images



Of all the World Cup matches I have attended, my favourite remains the first. Admittedly, my first World Cup match also remains my only World Cup match. But, equally admittedly, even if I had been to every single World Cup match since, it would still be high up the list. Tunbridge Wells, 1983, India v Zimbabwe. Kapil Dev's unmatched masterclass in How To Rescue Your Team From A Perilous 17 for 5.

The first top-level cricket I ever saw was the cream of Indian batsmanship being obliterated. Followed by one of the greatest innings in the history of the game. My cricket-watching career may have peaked too soon. Kapil came to the crease at 9 for 4, eight runs later watched Yashpal Sharma trudge back to the pavilion, looked at the scoreboard, and thought to himself, "1, 7 and 5. That's a nice collection of numbers. I wonder if I can make them appear together on the scoreboard again. Hmm, let me think about that. Yes, I've worked it out, I can. I'll take 1 for 75. No, no, scratch that, I've got an even better idea." A couple of hours later, Kapil left the field to thunderous and ecstatic applause – as thunderous and ecstatic as people are legally allowed to be in Kent, at any rate - with 175 not out to his name, and a place in the World Cup pantheon his for all time.

A small Andy Zaltzman was there to see it, a boy already captured by cricket, entranced by its heroes and numerical intricacies, attending his first game of professional cricket. Few of my school contemporaries at the time were as well-versed in Derek Randall's Test batting average as I was. Fewer still had a reasonable working knowledge of Mansoor Akhtar's performances for Pakistan. When ace 17th-century philosopher Francis Bacon wrote that "knowledge is power", he clearly did not have the same type of knowledge that I possessed as a small boy. Knowledge that proved of little heft in the school playground. (But then again, Bacon himself ultimately died as a result of trying to stuff snow up a dead chicken's posterior, so his "knowledge" was clearly vulnerable to the onset of over-excited but poorly planned experimentation.)

Somehow, and to this day it has never been satisfactorily explained, my father had managed to acquire a pair of tickets to sit in the pavilion, just a few feet from the players' dressing rooms. This was an unmissable autograph-hunting opportunity. The only autographs I had successfully hunted up to that point in my life were that of Geoff Capes, the British strongman and beard enthusiast, who had been a guest at a prize-giving at my school, and the opening batsman from the local village cricket team. I nervously approached this titan of a man, as he slumped into a deckchair with a cigarette after a brief and unsuccessful innings, and politely requested him to sign my notebook. He looked at me with a mixture of surprise, confusion and nervousness, as if he suspected I might be trying to trick him into buying something that he didn't want, as if the last time he had signed an autograph he had returned home to find a few set of automatic remote-controlled curtains and a bill for £3000. Little did I know at the time that village cricketers are unused to fielding autograph requests.