According to Sambit Bal, the 2011 World Cup was a special one in many ways. "India's win in front of Sachin Tendulkar's home crowd only lent a fairy-tale finish to an already memorable World Cup. After the bleakness of 2007 - when the fans stayed away, two marquee teams were knocked out in the first round, a coach died in mysterious circumstanes, and the final ended in farce - anything would have been an improvement. But this World Cup surpassed expectations."
Covering the World Cup final, Andrew Miller remarked: "Twenty-eight years on from the match that transformed the history of world cricket, India recaptured the crown that Kapil Dev and his men first lifted at Lord's in 1983, and this time they did so in their backyard. An iron-willed 97 from Gautam Gambhir was matched for intensity by the finest capain's innings since Ricky Ponting's in Johannesburg eight years ago, as M.S.Dhoni trumped a poetic century by Mahela Jayawardene to pull off the highest run-chase ever achieved in a World Cup final."
Cricket enthusiasts had expected a lot from the team of ESPN Cricinfo, but the book turned out to be a rehashed and mostly cut paste from the cricinfo's website with a few fresh articles from Sharda Ugra and Osman Samiuddin.
The book does not contain even a single scorecard of the tournament. We all would have loved to see the scorecards of atleast the semi-finals and the final apart from the basic stats - team and individual records - from the team of world number one cricket website.
Even the colour photographs are just average, lacking sharpness. The book is overpriced as well
|