Luck was the key factor in England's Cricket World Cup triumph, but does not detract from it

It is the end of the 2005 Ashes Test at Edgbaston, perhaps the greatest of all Tests played. Michael Kasprowicz has just gloved a brutal bouncer from Steve Harmison down the leg side. Madly, England have won the Test by two runs, to level the Ashes series. We all know what happens next.

Only, footage later showed that Kasprowicz’s hand was off his bat when his glove made contact with the ball. So, according to the laws of cricket, he should not have been given out. Without the simple luck of this umpiring error, it is easy to construct a whole alternative history of 2005.

Australia scramble the other three runs they need to win, going 2-0 up in the series. Then, England fail to win the last three Tests – as they would then have needed to do to regain the Ashes – Australia’s domination of the urn extends far beyond 16 years, and cricket’s 2005 moment never happens.

It is equally easy to construct an alternative history of the end of the 2019 Cricket World Cup final. When England need nine runs off the final three balls, and Ben Stokes hurtles back for two, the ball does not hit his bat and ricochet for another four runs.

Or, the scenario pans out exactly the same way, but the umpires react differently. Simon Taufel, a member of the MCC laws sub-committee, has said that a “clear mistake” was made by the on-field umpires during the pandemonium. Rather than awarding Stokes six runs on account of the overthrows, Taufel told Fox Sports, the umpires should have awarded him only five, in accordance with Rule 19.8 of the MCC laws of the game.

This states that, in the event of overthrows like those Stokes benefited from, these should only be added to the runs that the batsmen have already completed, and “the run in progress if they had already crossed at the instant of the throw or act”.

And this is where the umpires are considered to have erred. When Martin Guptill threw the ball in from long on, Stokes and Adil Rashid had not yet crossed for their second run. This means that, rather than earning six runs, England should have earned only five. Almost as importantly, it also meant that Rashid should have been on strike rather than Stokes. So, this decision was the difference between England needing four runs off two balls with Rashid on strike, and Stokes marooned at the non-striker’s end, and needing three off two balls with Stokes facing. Only one run, but a world of difference.

New Zealand’s luck was as rotten as for the gamblers in Monte Carlo Casino in 1913, who kept betting on red on the roulette table. The roulette wheel landed on black 26 times in a row – odds of 67,108,864-1 – and they lost millions. Ed Smith, England’s national selector, once wrote a whole book on luck. The final stages of the madly oscillating and unfathomable World Cup final provided ample material for a new chapter.

A trite cliche is that, in sport, luck evens itself out. Only, there are some moments that cannot even themselves out: every umpire’s call decision in every bilateral one-day-international series going in New Zealand’s favour could not make up for the luck of Stokes’s ricochet.

While competitions that are structured as leagues, rather than knockout cups, dilute the importance of luck, they do not eradicate it. Over league football seasons, the best team, based on their performances over the season, fails to win the title 40 per cent of the time, research from the football consultancy 21st Club has found.

Perhaps this is all an irksome narrative: it is nicer to think that England were better than New Zealand, if only infinitesimally, rather than simply luckier. The metamorphosis of England’s ODI team over four years is a more satisfying tale without luck being at the heart of their ultimate triumph.

A general unwillingness to accept the importance of luck extends well beyond sport; “Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck,” the behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman has shown.

Yet luck does not detract from England’s triumph, just as it did not detract from their glory in 2005, or indeed Pakistan’s World Cup victory in 1992. Instead, it is affirming that, in these days of hyper-professionalism, when developing talent has become almost industrialised and the economic clout of the biggest teams threatens to erode the uncertainty of who will win, the power of luck cannot be taken out of sport.