Mark Greatbatch, 1992.

With the schedule for the 2015 Cricket World Cup to be held in New Zealand and Australia announced yesterday (and you can click here if you’d like to read it), I thought it was time to bust out two not entirely beloved cricket anthems from the 90s. The first is the theme song from the 1992 World Cup (also hosted by New Zealand and Australia) which is etched into the brains of cricket lovers like myself who were first starting to play the game at the same time as our national team went on a seven-match winning streak.

It wasn’t just that we were winning either. We had a spinner opening the bowling (Patel), a recently out-of-form middle-order batsman was reborn as a swashbuckling opener (Greatbatch), a medium-slow in-swing bowler was the tournament’s second highest wicket-taker (Harris), a chubby journeymen-batsman became a swan-diving bowling mystery (Latham), military-medium pace became a genuine career option (Larsen, Latham, Harris), we hit the stumps from side-on (Harris again), our batsmen all scored runs (Rutherford, Jones, Greatbatch), while another one, Martin Crowe (c), was the best in the world.

I like to point out to people that even though we lost to eventual champions Pakistan in the semi-final, they toured here the following summer at the tail end of the year and lost the one day series to us 2-1. This means that in the calendar year of 1992, New Zealand beat every major nation in the world in one day cricket. Considering all the dark times the team has been through before and since, it’s good to clutch onto these little fun-facts.

So here it is, a song it is remarkably hard to find any information about (who wrote it, who sang it, why, and did the singer really believe Zimbabwe may’ve ruled the world? etc.), and one that contains lyrical gems like, “Who’ll rule the world? Who’ll rule the world? It’s great to be here, gotta’ see who’ll rule the world.” The 1992 World Cup theme song:

And acting as a bonus-track, who could forget Tim Finn’s unsettling Runs In The Family just a couple of years later? Recorded to mark the New Zealand Cricket centennial season, one of this country’s more pre-eminent singer-songwriters sang a song about cricket, diarrhoea and family history while dressed up in cricket whites and pretending to use a guitar as a bat. Complete with a mock West Indian-accented rap at around the two-minute mark, this song belongs to whatever hall of fame the Waratahs Cruising On Interislanderrrrrrrr song is in (officially known as Sailing To The Otherside). Here is the puntastic Runs In The Family: