Cricket May Be 'Coming Home' But We Hit Rock Bottom Last Time It Was Here...

Peter Hayter applauds the growing confidence within the England camp but also offers some cautionary memories from 20 years ago

Twenty years of hurt have come and gone and,along with the triumphs, there have been quite a few disasters in between, but for sheer stomach-churning horror, nothing, not even their catastrophic performance in the last tournament Down Under, has engendered the feelings that England supporters suffered the last time a World Cup was hosted on these shores.

For those yet unborn in 1999, and for those who, for the sake of their emotional well-being, had no option but to block out the memories, the words of former Middlesex and England paceman Angus Fraser to the audience at the Lord’s Taverners’ Spring lunch at the start of the week will serve as a neat summation.

“It was a nightmare,” recalled Fraser, the sweating workhorse of so many failed England campaigns in the Nineties and now his county’s managing director of cricket.

“We got knocked out before the song for the competition was released (see previous issues).

“It started with a contract dispute which was ludicrous. Lord MacLaurin (board chairman), who was used to dealing with the unions as head of Tesco, suddenly got a dozen cricketers feeling sorry for themselves and he made short work of us.