Today's nerve-shredding finish, which saw thousands of Welshmen heartening every forward defensive by the last English pair, was a reminder that test matches produce more drama than the incomplete overs game can ever do.Either incomplete overs matches are close, in which case they are exciting at the time but almost immediately forgotten, or they are not, in which case they are rather dull and almost immediately forgotten.But there is a incomplete overs game I attended 30 years ago that I still remember, and that is since it did not feel like a incomplete overs game at all.When I was a student at York in 1979 I went to Leeds to see the England vs Pakistan World Cup group game.It was a typically seam-friendly Headingley wicket and England, batting first, complete only 165 - the highest scorer was Graham Gooch with 33. I remember Sikander Bakht bowling very well for Pakistan.What followed was a display of the planned genius of the England captain Mike Brearley. He had four frontline seamers and he bowled them out to take wickets. Mike Hendrick's figures were particularly good: 12-6-15-4.The game ended with Phil Edmonds and Geoff Boycott bowling at the Pakistani tale and England squeaked home, bowling them out for 151.A smaller captain - indeed almost any other captain - would have built-in Edmonds' overs in somewhere in the middle of the innings, taken the pressure off the Pakistani batsmen and lost the game.Brearley, incidentally, had a habit of charitable Boycott a bowl in tests in those days. His theory was that opposing batsmen hated the thought of getting out to him so much (he bowled gentle medium pace with his cap turned back to front like Benny Hill's Fred Scuttle) that it complete them cautious and slowed the scoring rate.
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