Lord's prepares for final fireworks

If Pakistan win, the South Africans who beat them by three wickets at Trent Bridge a fortnight ago will have some small, vicarious consolation for their dramatic failure to score that single extra run against Australia on Thursday evening. If Australia vanquish Pakistan, they can claim simultaneous world supremacy in both Test and one-day cricket.

If there have been two dominant themes in the tournament, they have been Asian exuberance and Australian fortitude. It would be foolish to predict which will prove the stronger human quality tomorrow, but, in the past two finals, it has been the flair of a sub-continental team that has triumphed.

Having beaten England at Melbourne in 1992 and staged the match at Lahore last time in which Sri Lanka had ample to spare - 28 balls and three wickets indeed - when they beat Australia, Pakistan are quite capable of continuing the trend if their top-order batting can score sufficiently well on a hard pitch that should start dry and have some pace.

It is the relaid Test strip on which Donald, Pollock and Kallis bowled England to defeat last year and if the weather does not have a significant part to play - the forecast is for some early cloud and rain to clear into a bright and breezy afternoon - it should produce spectacular cricket.

It is rare indeed for any match to offer the prospect of so many mouth-watering individual duels: Shane Warne's wizardry versus Saqlain Mushtaq's flight and variation; Shoaib Akhtar's furious, uncompromising pace against Glenn McGrath's concentrated menace; Wasim Akram's inspirational leadership and swing bowling against Steve Waugh's bottomless will to win. And so on. Something will have to give, but it is all delightfully unpredictable.

After a semi-final such as the one at Edgbaston on Thursday, the first tied World Cup match, who can be certain that it will not again come down to some heart-stopping climax in the final over? Every objective Englishman will hope that it does and not care who wins. Should history repeat itself so soon, incidentally, the rules state that in the event of a tie or, heaven forfend, a no-result, the World Cup would be shared.

The prize for the winning team, $ 300,000 (about £187,500) is twice that which will be won by the beaten finalists. Should Pakistan be successful, the rewards would immediately be vastly increased by public, private and commercial donations. Throughout the sub-continent, every ball will be followed on television. Nor will there be much else on the sporting agenda in Australia. The stirring victory against South Africa last weekend and the desperate tie that followed five days later have made certain of that.

Both sides are expected to play their semi-final XIs, the Pakistan selectors having decided that they cannot risk a recurrence of Yousuf Youhana's hamstring injury. Darren Lehmann and Tom Moody both had disappointing games on Thursday, but they are experienced cricketers who will not be frightened by the prospect of a World Cup final before 30,000 at Lord's. On the contrary, as Waugh said to Fleming before the final over of the semi-final, "this is what we play for".

Pakistan's reaction to so important a game is less predictable, if only because they have so many young and relatively inexperienced men. If either side has an edge anywhere, it is probably Pakistan with their bowling. Wasim and Shoaib provide a formidable contrast with the new ball, one through guile, the other through sheer speed.

Against New Zealand, on a slow Old Trafford pitch in the semi-final, Shoaib clocked 94mph on the radar gun and averaged 86mph, despite occasional use of the much slower ball that deceived Chris Harris. Abdur Razzaq, however, relegated Wasim to the third-fastest Pakistan bowler on the day and produced a yorker that neither Shoaib nor Waqar Younis - now a mere dressing-room reserve - would have disowned.

It is the fourth seamer, Azhar Mahmood, who is the least-sung but most highly rated. The updated PriceWaterhouse listing puts him second in the world in one-day cricket, one place above Warne and four above McGrath. He has climbed so high mainly on the evidence of performances on different pitches overseas, but it is a reminder that not all that glisters in cricket turns to gold. The one-day game especially favours the efficient as well as the spectacular; the Azhars and Flemings as well as the Shoaibs and McGraths.

It is the players who have made this tournament, not the crowds, but, as always in professional sport, they have been interdependent. Income from the tickets for the final alone is £2.3 million, a record for a one-day match in England, but that sum will have been inflated many times by the active black market that has operated throughout the tournament.

After the semi-final at Edgbaston, many South Africans were selling tickets at four or five times their face value to Pakistan supporters and a caller to Radio 5 Live's cricket phone-in programme that evening told Jonathan Agnew that he would be prepared to pay £1,000 if necessary.

Tickets for the final were sold out within a few days of going on sale in May last year and the regulations that accompanied them state that any ticket resold for more than its face value will be invalid. It is, of course, an unenforceable edict. The Pakistan supporters will be there in large numbers for sure, as they have been for every other game in which Wasim's men have played.

An MCC spokesman promised "proactive stewarding" from a mixture of stewards and police, whose numbers will be far greater than for any normal leading match at Lord's. Banners and firecrackers - but not flags - are officially forbidden under the terms of tickets, but the resourcefulness of the Pakistan supporters will no doubt ensure that there are lime green shirts in plenty and, fireworks or not, nothing will quell their noise or their enthusiasm.

Nothing except, eventually perhaps, an Australia victory. Steve Waugh knew that his team had belatedly found form when they failed by only ten runs to chase a Pakistan total of 275 at Headingley in their group match. He said then that Australia would have to win their next seven games. Already, they have emerged triumphant from six of them.

June 19, 1999