ICC Cricket World Cup 2019, Tour Diary: Sherlock Holmes, India's high-visibility approach, and final West Indies flurry on the way out

World Cup day 31 One of the best things about London is finding all these places that you’ve heard of in stories of the past, but didn’t think were real. One of the busiest tube stations is Baker Street, which is on the way just before you reach Lord’s cricket ground. Every time a train stops at Baker Street my head starts playing the saxophone line from Gerry Rafferty’s song: “Winding your way down on Baker Street / Light in your head and dead on your feet…” [caption id=“attachment_6918091” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] London’s Baker Street tube station.[/caption] Baker Street was also of course where Sherlock Holmes had his office where he lay around on a couch and took drugs and deduced people’s entire personal histories by looking at their knuckles. Nice work if you can get it. People around this area are very aware of the association, and pictograms of Holmes decorate the train station. Still, it was a surprise when I was at ground level walking up to the corner of Baker Street itself, and Benedict Cumberbatch went riding past on his bicycle. (He happened to be in a TV show called Sherlock.) This is the magic of London. Though I did wonder if Benedict just rides round and round the block down there until someone notices and flags him down. We all need validation. I go through Baker Street station once more on a World Cup Saturday on the way to see Australia and New Zealand at Lord’s. Aaron Finch makes yet another hundred against England, his specialty, but the match rather peters out. Those of us watching are more drawn to the television screens, where Pakistan and Afghanistan are fighting to see who can fall apart most convincingly. Then the main excitement at Lord’s comes from watching Mitchell Starc’s final spell, glorious and frightening, and seeing him pick up yet another five-wicket haul. It’s properly summer on this day, even if it only lasts for one day. The air is dense and warm late into the night. The Saturday night trains all over the underground are packed, with people seemingly going from one festival to another. We all travel jammed up against one another and sweating profusely in the subterranean heat. Somewhere hours away in the darkness, Glastonbury Festival is going on, but there are plenty of people leftover in London. World Cup day 32 There’s no time to rest, as I’m up early the next morning to catch the train to Birmingham. England is taking on India, and everyone wants to be there. There are near-stampedes at Marylebone Station, and all kinds of delays beset the train network. I read all about them on my own train, having arrived just after all the chaos settled down. Birmingham is a curious sort of town. The middle of the city is a tangled mass of railways stations and giant shopping complexes and piazzas and a few narrow one-way roads that circle around like ropes trying to restrain a giant. As you walk out of this centre the walkways and roads spin out into confusing roundabouts and underground walkways. There is a shabby grandeur to parts of it, with public walls marked with bold art deco tiling, but where the paint is faded and peeling and the whole place doesn’t look like its seen much in the way of municipal funds since the post-war reconstruction period. But then there are cheerful planters of wildflowers down some of the footpaths, and plenty of trees and parks and hills as you start to walk out of the city towards the ground. [caption id=“attachment_6918111” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Fans watch the match on the big screen.[/caption] In a way, every major match at a World Cup is a kind of shipwreck. As you approach the beached hull you pass the human flotsam washed up on the shores of fate. The group of boys, maybe 20 at best, sitting roadside by a car with their heads in their hands or their glum faces turned to their phones. The blank-eyed desperation of those whose hunt for tickets is proving scarce, wandering in weakening circles like extras in The Walking Dead who won’t be much longer in the script. The ones who obviously can’t afford the ticket touts who move amongst them, sharp-eyed gulls scanning the shore, looking for another meal. England smash a big total, finally playing like England again, while India give the chase a fair shake for 40 overs and then give in. The press box at Edgbaston is one of the best in the world, high of angle but close to the boundary line, so you overhang the action and can get a perfect sense of the angles in the field that Virat Kohli looks to exploit, or how Kuldeep Yadav drops a ball into a shoebox, or the arc of a Jason Roy six and whether it will clear the man at long-on. The sun shines and England blue is indistinguishable from Indian in the stands, though on the field the Day-Glo orange of the Indian clash shirt assaults our eyeballs. If high-visibility clothing makes you safe, these have to be the most secure cricketers of all time. Edgbaston sits down near a creek, with the city skyline peeking over its shoulder and parklands surrounding it. There’s no better place for this spectacle. We all work until the sun has set, then it’s traditional in Birmingham for some of the cricket writers to end up at a pub called The Plough, with a big garden out the back and all kinds of food. In a long campaign, this feels like the first time we’ve been able to not think about cricket for a couple of hours. I pass out that night harder than I have in a month. World Cup day 33 Thankfully, Day 33 is a relatively quiet one: just the Bangladesh captain’s press conference, and watching the West Indies play Sri Lanka, and picking up a rental car for the next 10 days of madness. It’s madness even beyond the World Cup, because the Women’s Ashes series is about to start and will overlap the global tournament with its first three games. These will be One-Day Internationals played as day-night games, and because we’re never short of ambition for The Final Word podcast, me and Adam Collins are determined to cover these as well as the World Cup. So, we will start at Bangladesh-India in Birmingham, drive the same day to the Ashes in Leicester, cover England versus New Zealand from afar, do the next Ashes ODI at Leicester while watching Afghanistan play West Indies on TV, then drive to Leeds and to Manchester on the same day to preview India v Sri Lanka and Australia v South Africa, split our time between both matches at Leeds and Manchester the next day, drive that night to Canterbury for the third Ashes ODI the following day, then drive back to Manchester for the first semi-final, then Birmingham for the second, and return the car to take a train back to London for the final. No pressure. The West Indies, bless them, give us another entertaining match, another stirring individual performance, and another case of falling short. They’ve promised so much, been in winning positions so often, threatened crazy comebacks on two games where they were behind, and ultimately will go home with very modest returns. They have one more game against Afghanistan but it feels like today’s attempt was them firing their final meaningful shot. But thanks to Nicholas Pooran, and to Fabian Allen, and to Carlos Brathwaite, and to Sheldon Cottrell, for everything you’ve brought to this World Cup. For all the latest news, opinions and analysis from ICC Cricket World Cup 2019, click here