Cricket World Cup

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cricket World Cup was born in England in June 1975, and the game has never been quite the same since. Eight teams arrived at the first tournament, including a composite side drawn from East Africa and a Sri Lankan squad that had not yet earned Test status. South Africa was absent, banned from international cricket because of apartheid. The West Indies walked away champions, defeating Australia by 17 runs in the final at Lord's. What took cricket so long to organize a global tournament? Why did the game take more than a century of international competition before gathering all its nations in one place? And how did a format that began as a rain-day fix at a Melbourne Test match in 1971 grow into one of the most-watched sporting events on the planet? Those questions thread through every edition of the tournament, from the damp summer of 1912 to the record crowd at the Narendra Modi Stadium in 2023.

• 2. The Long Road to 1975

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  Cricket's first international match was played between Canada and the United States on the 24th and the 25th of September 1844. The first credited Test match came more than three decades later in 1877, when Australia met England. South Africa joined Test cricket in 1889, West Indies in 1928, New Zealand in 1930, India in 1932, and Pakistan in 1952. For most of that time, international cricket meant bilateral series stretched across three, four, or five days. A multilateral tournament had been attempted as early as 1912, when England, Australia and South Africa contested the Triangular Tournament in England. The event was not a success. The summer was exceptionally wet, uncovered pitches made play difficult, and crowds stayed away, with commentators blaming a surplus of cricket. A multilateral Test tournament would not be attempted again until 1999. The shorter game that eventually made a World Cup practical grew first at the domestic level. English county teams began playing one-day cricket in the early 1960s, with a four-team knockout called the Midlands Knock-Out Cup starting in 1962 and the inaugural Gillette Cup following in 1963. A national Sunday League took shape in 1969. The very first One-Day International arrived almost by accident on the fifth day of a rain-abandoned Test between England and Australia in Melbourne in 1971. The match was forty overs with eight balls per over, and Australia won by five wickets. That makeshift game, designed to compensate a frustrated crowd for a washed-out Test, planted the seed that grew into the World Cup.

• 3. The Prudential Years

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  England hosted the first three World Cups, all known officially as the Prudential Cup after the sponsor Prudential plc. Sixty six-ball overs per team, cricket whites, red balls, matches played in daylight: the format mirrored traditional first-class cricket as closely as a shortened game could. West Indies won the inaugural 1975 edition, with Roy Fredricks becoming the first batsman to be dismissed hit-wicket in an ODI, doing so during the final itself. The 1979 edition introduced the ICC Trophy as a qualification route for non-Test nations, bringing Sri Lanka and Canada into the tournament. West Indies defeated England by 92 runs in the final to claim a second consecutive title. At the meeting that followed, the International Cricket Conference agreed to make the competition a permanent quadrennial event. The 1983 tournament brought a new fielding rule: a circle 30 yards from the stumps, with four fieldsmen required inside it at all times. India, meeting West Indies again in the final, overturned the two-time champions by 43 runs and claimed a title that few had predicted for them.

• 4. Format Leaves England

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  India and Pakistan hosted the 1987 tournament, the first time the competition had moved outside England. The change in venue forced a practical change to the game itself: daylight hours in the Indian subcontinent are shorter than in the long English summer, so overs per innings were cut from 60 to 50. That number has remained the standard ever since. Australia defeated England by 7 runs in the final, the narrowest margin in World Cup final history until 2019. The 1992 edition in Australia and New Zealand introduced coloured clothing, white balls, day-and-night matches and revised fielding restrictions. It was also the first World Cup appearance for South Africa, whose teams had been excluded since 1970 because of apartheid. Pakistan emerged as champions after a slow start, beating England by 22 runs in the final. The 1996 tournament, held across the Indian subcontinent with Sri Lanka joining as a co-host, produced one of the tournament's most dramatic semi-finals. At Eden Gardens in Kolkata, Sri Lanka needed to defend a target of 252. India lost eight wickets while scoring only 120 in pursuit. The crowd reacted with protest, and the match was awarded to Sri Lanka by default. Sri Lanka won their first title days later in the final at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, defeating Australia by seven wickets.

• 5. Australia's Dominance

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  Between 1999 and 2007, Australia won three consecutive World Cups and built a run of 29 unbeaten matches in the tournament. The 1999 semi-final against South Africa at Edgbaston remains one of cricket's most discussed moments. Australia's Super 6 match against South Africa had ended with Australia reaching their target off the final over. The semi-final ended in a tie, but South Africa needed one run from the final ball to win. A mix-up between Lance Klusener and Allan Donald saw Donald drop his bat and strand himself mid-pitch, run out to end South Africa's campaign. In the final, Australia dismissed Pakistan for 132 and reached the target in under 20 overs, with eight wickets in hand. The 2003 World Cup, hosted across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya, saw Australia make 359 runs for the loss of two wickets in the final, the highest total ever scored in a World Cup final, defeating India by 125 runs. Kenya reached the semi-finals of that tournament, the best result ever recorded by an associate nation. New Zealand had forfeited their match in Kenya because of security concerns, a decision that helped Kenya advance. The 2007 tournament in the West Indies carried a shadow: Pakistani coach Bob Woolmer was found dead in his hotel room following his team's shock group-stage loss to Ireland, a World Cup debutant. Jamaican police initially treated the death as a murder inquiry before later concluding that Woolmer had died of heart failure. Australia won a third straight title, defeating Sri Lanka in farcical light conditions by 53 runs under the Duckworth-Lewis method.

• 6. Host Nations Rising

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  Australia's run of 35 consecutive unbeaten World Cup matches ended on the 19th of March 2011, when Pakistan beat them in their final group-stage match. That streak had started on the 23rd of May 1999. India, co-hosting with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, won the final at Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. Captain M.S. Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh finished the chase of 275, with Gautam Gambhir and Virat Kohli also contributing. The victory made India the first country to win the World Cup on home soil, and the final was the first World Cup final between two Asian teams. The 2015 tournament in Australia and New Zealand saw Australia claim a fifth title, beating New Zealand by seven wickets in the final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. New Zealand had reached that final for the first time, after a thrilling semi-final victory over South Africa. The 2019 edition in England produced the most extraordinary finish in the tournament's history. England and New Zealand were tied at 241 after 50 overs. A super over also ended in a tie, both teams reaching 15. The trophy went to England because their boundary count in the match exceeded New Zealand's. Neither team had previously won a World Cup.

• 7. Scale and the Trophy

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  The 2011 World Cup was broadcast in over 200 countries to more than 2.2 billion viewers. Television rights for the 2011 and 2015 tournaments combined sold for over US$1.1 billion, with sponsorship rights adding a further US$500 million. For the 2019 World Cup, the ICC claimed 1.6 billion viewers and 4.6 billion digital video views. The most-watched single match in that edition was India versus Pakistan, seen live by more than 300 million people. Attendance at the 2023 tournament in India reached 1,250,307, the highest of any edition. The trophy at the centre of all this attention has its own history. Before 1999, a different trophy was made for each tournament, including the Prudential Cup trophies for the first three editions. The permanent ICC Cricket World Cup Trophy was designed and made in London by craftsmen from Garrard and Co over two months. It stands 60 cm tall, weighs approximately 11 kg, and is made from silver and gilt. Three columns shaped as cricket stumps and bails support a golden globe representing a cricket ball, with a seam tilted to echo the axial tilt of the Earth. The names of all previous winners are engraved on the base, with space reserved for a total of twenty inscriptions. Australia added their sixth engraving after winning the 2023 final in Ahmedabad, defeating the host nation India by six wickets after Glenn Maxwell's double century rescued a precarious chase earlier in the tournament.