Dubai-Dhabi-Doo

This column is wrestling with an existential dilemma: is it more productive whinging and moaning about what we love, or actually doing the loving bit? Having indulged in an extraordinary amount of whinging and moaning of late, it feels duty-bound to flip the coin. Not least given that Phil Hughes' almost unbearably sad felling followed hot on the heels of sporting stories spanning racism, rape, corruption and an over-zealous tennis wife.

Hip-hip-hooray, then, for Arabia. For a fully qualified Anti-Anti-Semite to express such a sentiment is one thing. For a cricket-loving AAS to do so is plainly on the potty side of batty. I repeat nonetheless, with flagrant disregard for tribal loyalties: hi-hip-hoo-bloody-ray for Arabia.

Who would have guessed that a non-stop downer of a year like this one would wind down with Pakistan, those grievously wounded but tigerish nomads, standing tallest? Who knew, or even suspected, that the year's most sustained stretch of don't-blink cricket would be found in the UAE, out of sight and largely out of mind (as Azhar Mahmood, rather cynically, claims these artful scrappers prefer)? As everyone from Diana Ross to Frank Sinatra has almost-but-not-quite sung: Dubai-Dhabi-Doo!

Admittedly, this column didn't see a single ball of the four Tests staged in the Emirates this past month or so, and maybe that helped. These days, more than ever, seeing is by no means believing, especially in a world where the most damning verdicts are handed down by those informed exclusively by 140-character summaries.

Besides, there are consolations in ignorance. No first-hand evidence means more freedom: freedom to imagine, licence to idealise, a passport to intensely pleasurable, wholly childlike exaggeration. For those of us in danger of succumbing to a half-empty view of sport, fantasy exerts an irresistible pull.

Last Friday morning, I did a thoroughly modern thing. While working on a proposal for an academic project and monitoring office emails, I was scouring what remains of my refried brain to find a topic for this column. I was also monitoring ball-by-ball coverage of that slow-burning ODI thriller at the MCG "as live", while simultaneously checking with boyish relish on events in Dubai. My Russian great-grandfather - and probably pretty much anyone currently not dead - would have greeted this juggling act as incontrovertible evidence of looniness, but what do they know who only sanity respect?

The cricket won out, as it almost invariably does. Emails were attended to, such are the priorities in working remotely, but proposal and column progressed about as rapidly as a partnership between a spliff-toting Trevor Bailey and a ketamine-fired Mudassar Nazar.

In terms of cheap(ish) thrills, there should, on the face of it, have been no comparison. As Australia and South Africa grappled, jabbed and counter-punched, the 67th over of Pakistan's second innings found stumps being drawn with 30 deliveries unspent, the immediate reaction no more rousing than a sense of honour shared and justice done.

That, though, led to a deeper, more profound sensation: hope for a game whose need for a double Prozac on the rocks is almost as pressing as Barack Obama's. Sometimes, just sometimes, optimism can be recovered in the oddest places.

With around 45 overs left on that final afternoon, Pakistan were cruising, if not for victory then certainly for the draw that would maintain their advantage in the series. Yet in the previous few overs Younis Khan, the game's reigning most immoveable object, seemingly impervious to the allure of clock-watching pragmatism, had struck not one, not two, but three sixes. Three quick wickets put a stop to such audacious frippery but the glow lingered. Only later did I discover, much to my amazement, that a third Test beckoned. Dubai-Dhabi-Doo!

Still, as that MCG gripper tightened its hold, so another thought struck, however belatedly. Sod all that pointless palaver about which dish on the game's menu is worthiest of our consumption, affinity, respect and money. Sure, flannelled tomfoolery is in a right old mess, but hell, there's a World Cup looming: the nearest cricket gets to a rock festival. An occasion, more importantly, that demands as never before that we recall it not just as celebration and justification but inspiration. Ah, but what form should this take?

First, though, let's consider another question. Do we enjoy watching team sports primarily as a nod towards togetherness, as a vehicle for collective identity, to feel a sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves? Or does that enthralment stem mainly from our appreciation of skill and our awe for individual determination, resilience and courage? A brief inspection of sports where teams play on neutral territory outside World Cups offers both clues and blind alleys.

Let's kick off, confusingly, with the gridironers: 16 different teams have featured in the 11 NFL games played at Wembley since the birth of the International Series in 2007, yet each one has packed 'em in - ten pulled in 80,000-plus and the exception drew nigh-on 77,000. The show, it seems, is everything, the participants interchangeable and secondary. Much the same can be said of the NBA and MLB games that have been staged overseas. Conversely, the preferences of f***ball followers were encapsulated by the attendance for last week's Argentina-Portugal "friendly" at the Theatre of Dreams, Old Trafford: not even the presence of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo could hoist the gate much beyond half-capacity.

The opposite is often true of cricket, wherein individual contributions are so much easier to isolate and absorb. Even if we concede that Sachin Tendulkar will, in all probability, prove, like Don Bradman, to have been an aberration born of a nation's wish-fulfilment at a transformative juncture in its history, need we look any further than the success in South Africa of that monument to star appeal, the IPL? Well, yes, actually.

In contrast to the league format, one of the most compelling attractions of a knockout event should be unpredictability, but in the ICC World Cup only two winners - India in 1983 and Sri Lanka in 1996 - have truly fit that particular bill. And with only two minnows in the starting stalls this time, a spot of David-v-Goliathing in the group phase looms about as large as… well, let's just say the likelihood, six weeks ago, of Misbah-ul-Haq sharing a Test record for flamboyance with Viv Richards. Happily, cricket places far too great a store by excellence to get hung up on the fleeting splendours of giant-killing.

What, then, of the advent of an ingenious tactic? Given that Martin Crowe's decision to deploy a spinner, Dipak Patel, to open the Kiwi attack in 1992 had to wait until the early days of T20 to gain wider adoption, new-ball battering has been the only bonafide groundbreaker to date. Best not to put too many eggs in that basket.

On the surface, then, what we need most is a dazzling newcomer. Even a comet will do. Someone to distract, astonish and excite us, to renew faith in our conviction that there's only one beautiful game in town and it bloody well isn't f***ball.

Ominously, and perhaps surprisingly, it has by no means always been possible to associate the World Cup with a single performer, let alone the birth of a star. From where I'm sitting, eight individuals stick out, five of them for a single slice of climactic majesty: Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards' thunderous hundreds in the first two finals merely lifted their creators from exhilarating performer to indisputable great, as did Wasim Akram's reverse-swinging yorkers in 1992, and MS Dhoni's nerveless match-thievery in 2011, while Aravinda de Silva's decisive ton in the 1996 final came fully a dozen years after his international debut.

Sanath Jayasuriya's audacious eruption in that same tournament was more the sort of thing we crave, likewise Lance Klusener's similarly stupendous hitting three years later, but only the 18-year-old Inzamam-ul-Haq's impudently grand entrance in 1992 ranks as truly left-field. The portents, then, are not auspicious.

Of course, the trouble with cricket World Cups, by comparison with the other pinnacles of team sport, is that the same teams cross swords too often between tournaments. Complete unfamiliarity, therefore, is hard to come by, much less genuine surprise. Shikhar Dhawan, Aaron Finch, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Ajinkya Rahane will all be making their tournament debut, yet it feels as if they have been with us for a decade.

That's why, with 79 days to go, five of this column's half-dozen tips as breakthrough acts (it seems logical to confine this to debutants) have already served notice aplenty of their potency as well as their potential, namely Trent Boult, Junaid Khan, Mitchell Marsh, Varun Aaron and Quinton de Kock. Given the caution engendered by England's apparent reservations over Alex Hales' purportedly excessive predilection for off-side plunder, the odd man out is Ben Stokes, the vast majority of whose derring-doings have thus far been confined to county duties.

All roads, then, lead back to the collective. Notwithstanding the odds against a star or strategy emerging, what we need of the 11th World Cup above all is a vibrant tournament, not just one where the plot diverges from the predictable (Australia to beat South Africa in the final, since you asked) but where the heroes hail from outside the Big Bad Three.

In the circumstances, nothing would delight this column more than that the hands lifting the trophy should belong to that antidote to misery, the mighty Misbah.