After 45 days in India, zigzagging across this vast country on multiple flights and coach journeys, England’s World Cup campaign ends at Eden Gardens on Saturday. Pakistan, needing a mathematical miracle to reach the semi-finals surely beyond even their logic-defying abilities, are the last opponents for a once great team that exits the stage.
It has been a great team. Recency bias can be pretty potent stuff, like the HMV poll of 600,000 Brits in 1999 that placed Robbie Williams seventh – one place higher than Mozart – among the most influential musicians of the previous millennium. But in time the enduring memories of this England one-day side will be the first album, not the title defence that has unspooled like a faulty cassette tape these past seven weeks.
