OVERNIGHT, SHARJAH is a memory! The World Cup is the reality. This Saturday morning the dream of India winning the World Cup, on that pleasant English Saturday evening (of June 25, 1983), ends. For today is the Saturday on which the countdown really begins. Thirty days to go and South Africa to meet! ``Champions to be or not to be?'' turned out to be South Africa's dilemma in the Wills World Cup - as its coach, Bob Woolmer, made a shattering discovery. This `discovery' channel on TV told him that to be `on laptop of the world is one thing, to be on top of the world is quite another.

Azhar's India, that time, went one step ahead of Cronje's South Africa - the South Africa we are due to play, in this World Cup on May 15, at the English ground on which Ranjitsinhji and Duleepsinhji `Hove' to view. Azhar's India (on March 9, 1996) at least made the Wills World Cup quarter-final round a square-the- circle act in Indian eyes. India came up with a quarter-final victory embedded in our psyche, as it knocked Sohail's Pakistan out of the Wills World Cup with 39 runs to spare. Only, in so traumatically winning, Azhar's India made the mistake of thinking that, having overcome Pakistan, we had beaten the world. We drained ourselves to the dregs, mentally and physically, in putting it across Pakistan. Forgetting that there is a tomorrow even after beating Pakistan. We did not hold enough, in reserve, for the oncoming subcontinental challenge of bringing a `semi- finality' to the contest with Sri Lanka at Eden Gardens.

Sri Lanka, having beaten India conclusively (by 6 wickets) in the March 2 league match earlier, came to Eden with a spring in its step. Yet India had a chance to `step on it' straightway as the coin rolled kindly for Azhar. This was when Azhar, astoundingly, chose to ``do a Lord's''!

Remember how Azhar had, after calling right, elected to field first at the Mecca of cricket, in mid-1990, just to spite team manager Bishen Singh Bedi, who had shown himself to be the martinet at net practice? Thus did July 26, 1990, become the Lord's day of deliverance for England captain Graham Gooch, who proceeded to bat in a vein vintage enough to ensure that his willow came to be embossed with the magic triple digits of `333'. An England total of 653 for 4 wickets (decl.) made Bedi's face a study in mock - Azhar adversity. For a late counter of 77 not out by Kapil Dev (with 4 sixes and 8 fours - 0, 0, 6, 6, 6, 6 in one world Test record- shattering over from Eddie Hemmings) helped Azhar's India save follow on face by one precarious run, but that Lord's Test - and the three-match series - came to be lost with it by a whopping 247 runs. You could see Bedi wishing that the sacred Lord's earth would open and swallow him up!

From Bishen Singh Bedi to Ajit Wadekar - 16 years after India's having been bowled out for 42 at the same Lord's - came the Indian managership. If Azhar and Bishen had never been on the same wavelength, under the managership of Ajit (still symbolising the four letters of luck) and the leadership of Azhar, the Indian side metamorphosed into ``The Team of the ``Nineties'' that Raj Singh Dungarpur had envisioned it to be, as Krishnamachari Srikkanth (4 and 31; 36 and 13; 0; 10 and 3) was sent packing, as captain, for the rare achievement of having inspirationally drawn all four Tests in Pakistan - end-1989, his one-day scores of 18, 31 and 13 not out not having helped us win a single International. Happily, Ajit and Azhar now got on famously. India began regularly winning at least at home. So much so that Wadekar felt avuncularly beatific enough to pass on the manager's mantle to Sandeep Patil. The line of authority thus came to be blurred, as Sandeep Patil became Wadekar's understudy during the 1996 Wills World Cup itself.

Came the moment of reckoning at Eden. If Sri Lanka had carried all before it into the semi-finals here under Arjuna Ranatunga, India (under Azhar backed by Wadekar) did not feel it lagged all that behind. As at Lord's on July 26, 1990, the spin of the coin favoured Azhar at Eden on March 13, 1996. Only for Azhar to choose to accord the same `toss-away' treatment to Wadekar now, as to Bedi then, by opting to field first! On a freshly laid Eden Gardens wicket, if you please. Thus did Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad flatter India only to deceive the world, as they, misleadingly swiftly, accounted for the danger pair of Romesh Kaluwitharana (O) and Sanath Jayasuriya (1). How Aravinda de Silva (66 from 47 balls) seized the initiative from India to assert his champion pedigree and begin the process of filling India's Cup to the brim is a saga well documented by now. Things had gone wrong at Eden from the take-off point at which Sushmita failed to emerge as the `Sensation' she was labelled to be. Thus does Kavita Kapoor's punchline of ``One black coffee, please!'' - to accent the departure of Sachin Tendulkar (65) endure as a `spot' stamped in the mindset.

The World Cup for India is thus no longer a question of ``After Kapil who?'' It is now an urgent issue of ``After Kapil when?'' Within this century under Azhar? If not, it is Azhar's last `century' in world cricket - 2000 to 1! Lord's beckons to Azhar again. The problem is how to get there by June 20. No one in his wildest dreams had expected Kapil Dev to get there on June 25, 1983. Yet Kapil landed like a flying saucer to lift the World Cup! The West Indies just did not know what hit it - as the team on a World Cup hat-trick bent. At the bend, every post had looked a winning one to Lloyd and his men, no fear of till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinel''. In the truck driver's seat the Caribbeans were, secure in the knowledge that their fast-paced juggernaut had annihilated Kapil's India for 183. What was 183, in 1983, for the West Indies black-powered by Gordon Greenidge, Vivian Richards and Clive Lloyd, alongside Desmond Haynes looking an `anchor' without peer on TV?

How Kapil Dev went on to take Vivian Richards (33) in his Cup- catching stride is tele-history. How Kapil - in revealing a `raking' reach to hold that Viv hit sailing to another planet - cut the Lord's ground from under the West Indies feet is `televisionary'. The hand that mocks the Cup rules the World. The last World Cup that India had glimpsed (until that June 25, 1983 evening) was in field hockey. From Ajit Pal Singh to Kapil Dev Nikhanj, from Punjab to Haryana, had India now travelled as a global player. That vivid Viv `take' by Kapil proved, to the world, that cricket was as near athletics as made no difference. And the total athlete, rewardingly, is Azhar to this day. Would that he follows in the Lord's footsteps of Kapil in this age of youth!

Impossible? Ruled out in the light of our recent showing against Pakistan?

Our form against Wasim Akram and his men has provided genuine cause for concern, of course. Yet I am concerned, not worried - not yet. For I have this gut feeling that Pakistan, under Wasim Akram, have raced to the pinnacle too early. There were `judicial' scores to settle at home, so they worked themselves into exemplary frenzy against India - and, in the bargain, against the rest of the `triangular' opposition.

It is all very well to gear yourself to give the game all you have got in a circumscribed tri-series. But to sustain it, through the length and breadth of the World Cup (where the competition you encounter is multiracial), is another pair of cricketing shoes altogether. Form is a fickle mistress - in the habit of deserting you when most needed! This was the frailty- filled experience of South Africa in the 1996 World Cup. It very nearly was the wispy discovery of Pakistan too (under Imarn Khan) in the 1992 World Cup.

Imran Khan's ultimate 1992 triumph lay in the fact that his team peaked late. Far too late it had initially looked in the March 21 Eden Park semi-final against Crowe's New Zealand. Then, even as all had seemed gradually lost, everything came suddenly right.

The `Haqeeqat' is that Inzamam's 60 then turned the 1992 World Cup formbook upside down. From that point at which Sunil Gavaskar alone, on Prime Sports, espied Pakistan rushing to victory (against the till then magically New Zealand-centric game-plan of Martin Crowe), Imran Khan and his men looked thoroughbred to stay the World Cup course.

Such was its effrontery by now that Pakistan had even Mohican Ian Botham rattled in the March 25 Cup Final at Melbourne. As New Zealand's B. L. Aldridge ruled England's contingency opener Botham out for a `Packer duck' (angularly caught by conscience 'keeper Moin Khan off Wasim Akram), Aamir Sohail (moving up from midwicket to `midwicket') summoned the gumption to ask `Guy The Gorilla' to get lost and ask his mother-in-law to come and bat for him! That Sohail `send-off' signalled the champagne spirit at last animating Pakistan in the 1992 World Cup.

Isn't the same world-beater feeling to the fore in Wasim Akram and his men right now? Yes and no. Yes, Pakistan under Wasim Akram have demonstrated that they definitely have the fire-power to take on the world. No team, however, can rationally hope to sustain such a golden run through the 38-day, 42-match distance race that the World Cup now is.

Pakistan could certainly get it all back, in a jiffy, if it was just a question of taking on India, alongside a Sri Lanka gingerly feeling its World Cup way back. But, for the motivation to grip Pakistan afresh in the moment that matters, Wasim Akram and his men have, ironically, to `de-peak' for now.

If only because the 1999 English summer marks a new season, a different stage and a different scene altogether - for Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India alike.

The World Cup, in the grand sum, is something more than an Asian one-day championship. Shoaib Akhtar is already (in hip-build and aggression of approach) a ferocious rewind to Freddie Trueman in his heyday. But the key to success, on English wickets, is control. Shoaib Akhtar admirably has this control on Asian wickets. To develop it on English wickets - where the ball swings (from May 14) even if you do not want it to - is an art. And a craft. The art is potentially there in Shoaib Akhtar. The craft takes a few English seasons to perfect, like in the classic mould of Wasim Akram.

Pakistan has the talent in 1999. But when, in the near quarter- century of the World Cup, did Pakistan not have the talent? That talent has to coalesce - and there's the English new-ball rub!

India, too, inherently has the talent. But, for some time now, this talent has not been coming together. Understandably, there was a certain subtle resentment, in the Indian team, about the multimedia projection that Sachin Tendulkar was getting to the virtual blankout of the rest. Well, Sachin left the one-day tri- series arena clear, this once, for Saurav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Ajay Jadeja and who not? Did those who follow Sachin, in the Indian batting order, consistently grab the opportunity to prove that Tendulkar was not `Mr. Conspicuous' by his absence? They didn't, they merely put a laidback Sachin in front of a TV set that proved, to Tendulkar, that he had, willy-nilly, to pull out something extra, if he was to get even with Brian Lara all over again.

Nor is the World Cup a mere limited-overs confrontation between Tendulkar and Lara. The World Cup is an international contest, throwing up fresh talents sure to dare Tendulkar, Lara, et al, the moment they think they have the field all to themselves. True Brian Lara has peaked just in time for the 1999 World Cup. Equally true, Sachin Tendulkar has to peak all over again. Pakistan, for its part, has now to peak when Tendulkar is fighting for his world title. But is Sachin title-holder still? `Live' TV challenger Lara certainly is. The interface promises to be razor-keen. The world is an open cup, the close-up on TV proclaiming that it doesn't get any bigger than this. `Small wonder' Tendulkar has his `Bradmantle' to guard.

The World Cup for India is no longer a question of after Kapil who? It is now an issue of after Kapil when?, writes RAJU BHARATAN

Source: The Hindu