them ragged, but it looked as though we were bound to run out of time, balls, and light.
Yet the umpires, Steve Bucknor and Mohammad Nazir, clearly miffed by the delaying tactics, seemed determined to carry on, come what may.
In the dressing-room we were all going crazy. As per usual cricket superstition dictated that no one was allowed to move from their position. Nasser was doing his nut about the time-wasting, worst of which was the bowlers changing from round the wicket to over again ball after ball. It was taking so much time for the groundstaff to wheel the sightscreen into position every time the bowlers changed over, that Matthew Hoggard ran out of the dressing-room and started pushing it himself. And when Hick was out and Nasser went in with only a few needed to win, the light was all but gone. Trying to spot the whereabouts of the ball was nigh on impossible. The only clue you got was when one of the fielders moved and in the end it was so dark nobody did.
I had no idea where Thorpe’s winning runs had come from until we watched the finale on TV much later. But when they did we celebrated in somewhat surreal fashion, by spraying bottles, grand-prix style, all over the dressing-room. No one seemed to mind much that they contained 7Up and Coke – no alcohol allowed, of course – but there wasn’t a drop of British Airways champagne left when we arrived home the day after.
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