Kapil drops Viv

Richards hits Madan Lal up in the air in the 1983 final, and billions of dollars in future TV deals hang in the balance Patrick Eagar / © Getty Images

Cook c Jadeja b Singh 15. The nightmare continues. Alastair Cook must go. Perhaps he's already gone. Maiden Test wicket for Pankaj Singh, India's exciting new pace bowler. Sharp catch made to look easy by Ravindra Jadeja, England's bete noire.

As a conclusion, it looked among the forgonest. Cook, his team trailing 0-1, had nicked Bhuvneshwar Kumar's first ball just short of second slip, played and missed at Mohammed Shami's fifth. Pankaj was ploughing that off-stump furrow into which England's captain had been stumbling all summer; Jadeja was on the qui vive for an opportunity; good judges stood poised to write Cook's obsequies.

And somewhere else in the multiverse, perhaps they did, and Kevin Pietersen is now back as England captain, with Shane Warne coach by Twitter. But in our bit, the knee-high chance popped out, Cook ground on, and by afternoon MS Dhoni had curiously knuckled under. Pankaj became a universal hard-luck story, Jadeja an embarrassing passenger, and the whole scenario had become a testament to the abiding power of "what if?"

In hindsight, as they say, everything is inevitable. Cook's a good player, and was bound sooner or later to enjoy the bit of luck he needed, wasn't he? Actually, no more likely than on previous occasions, any more than three consecutive heads at a coin toss invariably prelude a tail. Such scenarios involve a kind of cognitive dissonance, a paralleling of platitudes: the one about it being a game of inches, and the one about the harder you work being the luckier you get. The latter, frankly, holds the more appeal, everyone wishing to see success in terms of skill and perseverance, for the sake of the vogue humblebrag: "I wasn't the most talented. I was just hungrier/harder-working/more virtuous/more modest than everyone else." But who dares neglect the former?

From Sir with love: the drop by Jadeja that turned the tide for Alastair Cook and England in the 2014 series © PA Photos

First-class cricket even makes an implied allowance for alternative outcomes by involving a second innings - a chance for redress, an opportunity for revenge. Had Pascal been a modern cricketer, he would hardly have needed Cleopatra's nose to make his point about little things making great historical differences.

We can divide these factors, roughly, into three types: those, like Jadeja's drop, involving on-field occurrences; those, like the MCC's decision first not to pick and then to pick Basil D'Oliveira to tour South Africa in 1968-69, involving off-field argy-bargy; those, like Glenn McGrath's pre-match mishap at Edgbaston in 2005, involving acts of God. Some what ifs combine two of these. Any what if arising from an umpiring gaffe in a series involving India, sans DRS, could be regarded as involving all three.

The first category is the easiest to relate to - for has there ever been a truly flawless innings involving not a single false stroke, not a gram of fortune? Think Kiran More at Lord's in 1990 missing Graham Gooch at 36 going on 333. Think Chris Scott at Edgbaston in 1994 grassing a nick from Brian Lara at 18 going on 501 not out ("With my luck he'll make a hundred," Scott is alleged to have said). Yet, at the risk of pedantry, these are more what wases than what ifs: the world would have gone on not missing what it had never had in the event More had swallowed Gooch, and Scott had pouched Lara. The greater counterfactual potency is to be found in the catch that is taken on which a history is then built. And here no more obvious example exists than Kapil Dev's glorious intervention in the 1983 World Cup final, which almost needs no elaboration, but benefits from being told in the catcher's own words.

First-class cricket even makes an implied allowance for alternative outcomes by involving a second innings - a chance for redress, an opportunity for revenge

Viv Richards strode to the crease and had a determined air about him. He was timing the ball sweetly and took a heavy toll of our bowling. He reached a quick-fire 33 with the help of six explosive boundaries… At 2 for 57 the Windies only had to get 127 off 46 overs with Richards in full flight. It looked like a foregone conclusion and we were praying.

Richards swung at Madan Lal and the ball soared over midwicket. It was always going away from me as I sprinted towards the boundary and I overtook the flight path of the ball, 20 yards in from the boundary. I caught a glimpse of it descending over my left shoulder and I was running away from it. I slowed fractionally and managed to hang on to the ball in the tips of my fingers.

Kapil's autobiography is called By God's Decree, and the foregoing is suitably pervaded by a sense of divine providence. Watch the replay sometime. Study the amiability of Madan Lal's approach, the inviting shortness of his long hop; check the contempt of Richards' pull, the few jogged steps he takes after it. It's a miscue but it feels safe. "Shot," is Richie Benaud's initial laconic utterance. And had Kapil stationed anyone but himself at midwicket it probably would have fallen into space - only he in this Indian team had the skill, poise and athleticism to match the task. Funnily enough, few remember that Kapil took nearly as good and perhaps as important a catch later - Lloyd pouched red-hot at extra cover. But it's the catch of Richards that cricket lovers recall, perhaps precisely because the seconds of its flight invite you to consider all the alternative outcomes and their impacts. At last comes Benaud's revision of his preliminary judgement: "Not so good."

What if Basil D'Oliveira had never been considered for the 1968-69 tour to South Africa © Getty Images

Well, it was good for some - nay, many. Especially when you weigh up the entirety of what flowed from India's improbable victory in the final of a tournament they had entered as 66-1 outsiders: India's spiritual and material acclamation of its victorious cricketers; the BCCI's sudden and rapturous embrace of the one-day international; its decision to bid, with its Pakistani counterpart, for the right to stage the next World Cup.

For the new sway of television on the subcontinent was even then exaggerating the sway of sporting events: 1982 had brought the first satellite broadcast and colour television to India, specifically in the latter case in response to the Asian Games in Delhi. The 1983 World Cup can in this context be regarded as twice a miracle - both in the victory and in India's opportunity to watch it.

Had Kapil dropped the catch, what then? Would he have paralleled the pariahhood of poor, benighted Mir Ranjan Negi, goalkeeper in India's horrendous 1-7 Asian Games hockey defeat at the hands of Pakistan? Probably not: cricket is better than most games at allowing for the submergence of individual culpability. But had Richards gone on to blast West Indies to another World Cup triumph at Lord's, as he had with his throwing arm in 1975 and his bat in 1979, it's unlikely there would have been the immediate impetus for the World Cup bid that succeeded so momentously a year later. And without that, Jagmohan Dalmiya might have remained a shrewd domestic cricket administrator in Calcutta, rather than embarking on the career that ended up with him as the inaugural president of the ICC.

If a triangular tournament had been played in 1909, England could well have been the weakest team; and it might even have diluted the importance of Anglo-Australian cricket

Turn the clock back a century or so and something similar can be said - with one important qualification. What if Charlie Studd and Ted Peate had scrambled those eight runs necessary for victory at The Oval in 1882? Well, cricket would have been deprived of one of its touchstone legends; it would also have gained another, Studd and Peate assuming the guise of Hirst and Rhodes 20 years early, albeit frankly not as good, for Fred Spofforth saying that "this thing can be done" then being proved wrong is simply a bit sad. Yet the observable reality is that Australia and England were already positioned, by the first Test, by the Australian defeat of MCC in 1878, and by England's hard-won victory at The Oval in 1880, to develop a meaningful rivalry, serving, as it did, both imperial and nation-building ends.

The qualification is obvious too: a plucky English win would have called forth no spoof obituary from Reginald Brooks in the Sporting Times commemorating the brief vogue for cremation jokes, have therefore inspired no urn for a muck-up match on the Clarke family's Rupertswood estate early the following year, and have therefore established no totem for Pelham Warner to revive on his way to Australia 21 years later. Brooks' eccentric and esoteric gag seems a spur-of-the-time, and consequently unrepeatable, intercession. Nobody was seeking a symbol or trophy for Anglo-Australian cricket exchanges in 1882; any such official need later would have been more orthodoxly expressed, probably by something like the Ryder Cup (1927) or Bledisloe Cup (1931), sans the connection to the competition's earliest contests.

Not all events, then, ramify alike. Quite apparently big deals can end up having limited consequences, while what in hindsight seem minor possibilities can open up interesting counterfactual possibilities. That's especially so in our second category of what ifs from off-field influences. Consider two imbroglios in South African cricket more than a hundred years ago.

Asian bloc: India's 1983 World Cup win gave subcontinental cricket a voice and bargaining power © Getty Images, Associated Press

The first involves the now semi-mystical Krom Hendricks, who in March 1892 represented a Malay XVIII against Walter Read's touring England team, and was judged by them the fastest bowler they had encountered. When South Africa assembled their first team to tour England a year later, Read urged them to one essential choice: "If you send a team, send Hendricks; he will be a drawcard and to my mind the Spofforth of South Africa." And when the South African Cricket Association's secretary Harry Cadwallader mooted a touring party, he duly proposed dark-skinned Hendricks, while admitting it "may cause rabid colonists to change colour".

Cadwallader was right. Although the inclusion of Hendricks had strong supporters, ranging from the tour's financial backer James Logan to South Africa's keeper/selector Ernest Halliwell, the initiative encountered immovable and eventually vindictive opposition from William Milton, private secretary of the Cape Colony's prime minister, Cecil Rhodes. Milton was at that stage drafting the Glen Gray Act, the basis of segregationist labour policies anticipatory of apartheid. He was also the most powerful cricket administrator in Western Province, the dominant member of the South African association. Opposition to Hendricks' selection was emolliently explained by another Rhodes protégé, Abe Bailey, that "because our men were going to England to learn rather than with the hope of achieving any great glory", it was "not absolutely necessary to lift a coloured man up", which might have a "moral effect… on the whole coloured population". In other words, South Africa were prepared to lose rather than provide encouragement for its majority peoples.

What if Harold Larwood's bouncer had killed Bert Oldfield in Adelaide in January 1933, rather than simply causing a linear fracture of the right frontal bone?

Although no photograph or public record of Hendricks survives, his proto-D'Oliveira story has been rediscovered in recent years with a poignant sense of what might have been, notably by Jonty Winch in Cricket & Empire (2009) and Drew Forrest in The Pacemen (2011); his name produces many more hits on Google than Dale Steyn's does. But for all Hendricks' symbolic resonances now, it is hard to see how the story could have had another outcome. As Eric Midwinter puts it in The Cricketers' Progress: Meadowland to Mumbai (2010): "With his sensitivity to the import of political tokenism, Cecil Rhodes could not risk fouling his message by permitting a non-white cricketer to play for South Africa." White and non-white cricket in South Africa were heading in opposite directions, the 1897 foundation of the South African Coloured Cricket Board registering the cleavage.

The other episode, more complex and arguably more provocative, also involves the ubiquitous Abe Bailey, who succeeded Logan as South African cricket's chief benefactor, bankrolling the successful visits to South Africa both of Australia in 1902-03 and of England in 1905-06. He then threw his weight behind the Springboks' 1907 tour of England, on which they won two-thirds of their matches and made a handsome profit.

Soon after, confidence booming, the ebullient Randlord threw down an entrepreneurial gauntlet, mooting a three-team tournament: England hosting South Africa and Australia in 1909, overseen by an "imperial cricket board". His ostensible purpose was that "rivalry within the Empire cannot fail to draw together in closer friendly interest all those many thousands of our kinsmen who regard cricket as their national sport", but there were commercial and cultural considerations too. Bailey's manoeuvrings had the implicit patronage of Lord Harris, not only treasurer of MCC and imperial cricket's chief votary but chairman of Rhodes' Consolidated Goldfields of South Africa. It fed in, too, to some peevishness among the English counties about bumptious Aussies with their long and lucrative Ashes tours tending to overshadow domestic cricket.

The damp squib: The 1912 Australia-South Africa Triangular Test at Old Trafford couldn't draw the sort of crowds that had been expected. Australia won by an innings inside two days © Getty Images

Here, in fact, lay the problem. Australia's cricketers were already expecting to visit England in 1909 on their own - a scenario additionally complicated by their tense relations with their country's inchoate board of control. Yet Bailey was nothing if not an optimist: he thought there was "no reason to suppose" that Australia would resist the triangular plan, and vowed to "personally do all in my power towards smoothing any [financial difficulties] that may exist". He had important playing backers too, including CB Fry and Pelham Warner.

In the end, both the Australian team and their board insisted on a monopoly summer, because both had their eyes on the money this would bring - in fact, it was a dispute about this tour's financial records between player-appointed manager Frank Laver and board-appointed treasurer Peter McAlister that led to the final showdown of players and administrators. All of which helped ensure the failure of the Triangular Tournament when it did take place three years later, because Australia's six leading cricketers declined to make the tour on terms their board set - that in addition to South Africa's very good team having in the meantime declined, and the weather being bloody.

The three-year, three-way tug-o-war over Bailey's idea has been excellently chronicled by Patrick Ferriday in his Before the Lights Went Out (2012). But imagine the possibilities had Bailey had his way the first time, for international cricket at this early stage might have ended up quite differently configured. Had Bailey been able to put together a coalition of cricketers and respected backers, not only might he have had his tripartite cricket attraction in 1909, but the game down under might have reverted to the player-led form in which it had been established. For without revenue, the board would have gone the way of its precursor body, the late, unlamented Australasian Cricket Council (1892-1900).

While we're considering acts of God in Adelaide, it's also worth wondering what might have transpired had rain stayed away from there on March 1, 1992

South Africa in 1909, moreover, would have had all four of its great googly bowlers in harness: Reg Schwarz (who doubled as Bailey's private secretary), Ernie Vogler, Gordon White and Aubrey Faulkner, takers of nearly 400 first-class wickets between them in 1907. In Faulkner, they had perhaps the world's best all-round cricketer; in captain-cum-keeper Percy Sherwell, Dave Nourse and Tip Snooke, they had three sound batsmen. In a 1909 Triangular Tournament, England could well have been the weakest team; the "imperial cricket board" would thereby have gained greater relevance and might even have subtly diluted the importance of Anglo-Australian cricket.

As it was, Bailey's tournament was a squib and the Imperial Cricket Conference remained just that, an occasional beano devoid of real authority. Administrative power continued to consolidate in national boards and influential clubs, chiefly those in the two longest-standing rivals. Certainly there was little sense of common weal when another entrepreneur with a cricket triangular idea who had no compunction about contracting star cricketers directly came along in 1977. Irked by generations of slights and pinpricks from their board, Australian players signed with Kerry Packer most eagerly of all. Irritated at being required to subsidise a doomed legal action of marginal relevance to them, the ICC's other members likewise suited themselves.

The third category of what if, from exogenous factors, is especially volatile, spanning as it does the randomness of injury and weather. What if, for example, Harold Larwood's bouncer had killed Bert Oldfield in Adelaide in January 1933, rather than simply causing a linear fracture of the right frontal bone? Larwood thought it had: "Critics and spectators had been prophesying that bodyline would kill someone sooner or later. It seemed that dark moment had arrived." Oldfield, as he told Ray Robinson later, knew it could easily have done so: "How lucky I was! Had it struck me here [fingering his temple a couple of inches lower] it would have been the end of me."

Would the Ashes rivalry have turned out differently if Charlie Studd had taken England across the line at The Oval in 1882? © Getty Images

The appalling consequences of such an accident have just been witnessed, with the death of Phillip Hughes, seemingly from out of a cloudless sky. Imagine such a lethal accident in the volatile environment 82 years ago, when Ashes cricket itself stood on some kind of brink, angry and bitter as never before. As it was, the ill humour of the Adelaide Oval crowd caused Larwood to eye the stumps as potential defensive implements in the event of a riot: "I felt as if one false move would bring the crowd down on me." News of an actual fatality would almost certainly have precipitated that invasion. And whether the English players would have actually been harmed, such a demonstration, combined with memories of previous English objection to Australian crowd behaviour, would probably have curtailed Ashes cricket for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, the loss of a player would have provided strong moral propulsion to the telegrams that the Australian Board of Control was about to fire at Lord's. "Lethal" was a stronger criticism than "unsportsmanlike". Jardine's masters, furthermore, would hardly have been so tactless as to dicker over details, such as that Larwood had been bowling to an orthodox field at the time, that Oldfield had deflected the ball into his head after losing sight of it because of an inadequate sightscreen.

What might have been the long-term impact on the game itself? It happened that baseball's American League had lived through a parallel incident 12 years earlier, involving a popular victim, the Cleveland Indians' Ray Chapman, struck in the head by an unpopular pitcher, the New York Yankees' Carl Mays. Mays, what's more, had been purveying his controversial stock-in-trade, the hard-to-see spitball delivered in his consciously deceptive "submarine" fashion. Baseball's response was prompt: the spitter was outlawed after 1920; batting helmets and dugout screens came steadily into fashion. The impact on the ornery Mays was more lingering. His demeanour at the time - he never left the mound, and continued to pitch in the game - was held against him. Despite his formidable record, baseball's Hall of Fame can find no place for him even 95 years later. The incident has inspired a book, Mike Sowell's The Pitch That Killed (1989), recently optioned for a film, Deadball.

Graham Gooch raising the trophy and saying modestly that there was a bit of petrol left in the tank could never hold a candle to Imran Khan's cancer hospitals

Cricket was probably not ready for helmets; the trend whenever bowling has threatened the hegemony of batsmanship has in any case almost invariably been a change in the Laws. Marylebone would eventually condemn "direct attack"; actual bloodshed might have forced more extreme remedy, like a halfway line on the pitch behind which it was illegal to pitch. Even as it was, Bill O'Reilly noted, the bouncer became almost taboo until after World War II: "A bowler was regarded as a social leper if he appeared to let one go with malice aforethought. Should he exasperatedly let one fly, he was always very quick to say, 'Sorry, it slipped.'" Imagine the mini-series Bodyline, which had it needed to depict such an incident would probably have featured Oldfield's head exploding on being grazed by an offbreak.

Nor should the potency of Oldfield as a potential cricket martyr be underestimated. As a corporal of a stretcher party in the 15th Field Ambulance, he had survived being blown up at Polygon Wood; had his ultimate sacrifice been saved for the cricket field, he would surely have become a sainted name, honoured in two-minute silences and in statues of his figure pirouetting to the ground. Oldfield's cap sold for A$28,000 in October 2000. Had he perished, it might have become Australia's equivalent of Nelson's Trafalgar jacket in the National Maritime Museum, or Abraham Lincoln's Ford Theatre top hat in the Smithsonian Institution.

While we're considering acts of God in Adelaide, it's also worth wondering what might have transpired had rain stayed away from there on March 1, 1992. In their meeting as part of the World Cup round robin that morning, England routed Pakistan for 74, and were 17 for 1 from six overs at lunch. But because only two more overs were possible, England had to share the points. Seventeen days later, at the last gasp, Pakistan faced unbeaten New Zealand in Christchurch, and a powerful West Indies chased only 217 set by the disappointing Australians in Melbourne. Thanks to bracing bursts of left-arm pace, from Wasim Akram and Mike Whitney, Pakistan squeezed into the last four ahead of West Indies, who had earlier towelled them up by ten wickets. A week later, Imran Khan's "cornered tigers" were champions of the world.

Clear skies on March 1, 1992 and what remains? Dipak Patel? Eddo Brandes? Twenty-two off one ball? Ian Botham stomping out on Gerry Connolly? Okay, so that's not a little, and the uniforms for the first technicolour Cup have never been improved on. But Graham Gooch raising the trophy and saying modestly that there was a bit of petrol left in the tank could never hold a candle to Imran Khan's cancer hospitals and personal pronouns, not least in the refugee camp of Kacha Kara, where displaced Afghans celebrated alongside their temporary hosts. From this unlikely bridgehead was staged cricket's advance into Afghanistan, whose latest stage will be reached this year when its cricketers meet both England and Australia in a World Cup down under. There obtrudes here, then, the counterpart of what if: what if not?

Gideon Haigh is a cricket historian and writer

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