The Fault in New Zealand’s Stars!

England didn’t win it, New Zealand didn’t lose it. Yet there was ecstasy and agony at the same time. Luck? Or was the fault in the stars?

Exquisite! Exciting! Incredulous! Iniquitous! Riveting! Scintillating! Sensational!

Throw in all the adjectives you want, analogize everything you witnessed to a roller coaster ride at Six Flags or a Steven Spielberg thriller. Eat your heart out, Game of Thrones, Red Wedding episode, this had a more dramatic ending for real hearts were wounded over the fictional ones that were stabbed.

No seriously, throw in every word that you can find, because that’s what these twenty-two individuals did in some capacity or the other, they threw the kitchen sink and every weapon in their armory and every arrow in their quiver. And yes, there was an individual named Archer who fired his own arrows in the end, but that’s beside the point.

But as the late Trinidadian writer C.L.R James said, “What do they know of cricket, that only cricket knows”? And ergo, what do we know of the finals, that only the finalists know? We saw it, but can we truly empathize the incredulity of ecstasy and agony in a single frame, if we weren’t in one of the squads?

It made, sense that a victor would be coronated, but it made little sense how? England won by zero runs and New Zealand lost by zero runs, not once, but twice. So England didn’t win it and New Zealand…