After 1999 Debacle, Cup Finds Redemption Song

Adam Collins discovers, with some relief, that the 2019 World Cup anthem is nothing like 1999’s monumental disaster.

In election campaigns, the days that break your heart are when the oxygen is drained by everything other than your message for voters – doubly so when this is the product of an own goal.

It’s for this reason that the launch of the Cricket World Cup anthem this week, oddly, had a fair bit riding on it. And I’m happy to report that we have nothing to worry about.

Why does the song matter so much, you might ask as a younger reader? Well, it’s a story that goes back 20 years to when England last hosted the World Cup. Then, the botching of the song that accompanied the tournament became an emblem of everything that went wrong (often rather unfairly) in that competition, including the host’s inglorious group-stage exit.

For the sheer nonsense of it all, it is worth recapping the All Over The World debacle.

Dave Stewart, of Eurythmics fame, was commissioned by the organising committee but, for reasons that have never been made entirely clear, it wasn’t released until the midway point of the World Cup – the day after England were eliminated.

As Nicholas Freestone notes in his superb blog post on the topic, it sits as one of cricket’s “most bizarre pieces of memorabilia”. The video was worse again, a cringe-worthy parody of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest with patients escaping an asylum to play cricket, the singer arrested. It’s worth three minutes of your day on Youtube if time permits.

“I wasn’t expecting the song he produced,” 1999 World Cup tournament director, Terry Blake, recalled to me this week. “I certainly wasn’t expecting the video that he produced, which I thought was unbelievably wrong. It was dark. And I’m afraid to say, it rather mirrored my mood as we got closer to the tournament where stress levels were fairly high.”