Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Stop all the clocks. Rename the stadium. Prevent the DJ from pumping out his relentlessly upbeat musical blurts. On a day of light, fury and also silence, India’s World Cup, the World Cup of the Invincibles, ran out of road at the Narendra Modi Stadium.
This was a piano forte kind of final, a day defined by extremes of noise and silence, expressed in volume rather than pictures, sound rather than light. The start was all noise, from the thrillingly sui generis energy of a 92,453 cricket crowd, to the jets pirouetting in the Ahmedabad sky, to Ravi Shastri’s hype-man shtick at the toss, a feverish, panama-hatted figure, arms revolving like an amphetamine-crazed general in the wreckage of Stalingrad.
