WORLD Cup heroes?

Hardly.

The politicians, fans and segments of the media who have been glorifying our national team cricketers over the past couple of weeks must have been watching a different tournament to the rest of us.

There isn’t anything too heroic about a 257-run hammering from India, the worst beating in World Cup history, a 243-run thumping from Sri Lanka or a seven-wicket drubbing from Bangladesh.

What those results represent are a lesson in how the game should be played.

Those are the cold, hard facts.

Yes, the fabulous support the team received during all three matches and on their return home was commendable. What other national teams get the same backing after they’ve been thrashed out of sight!

When India and Pakistan returned home this week, they too were greeted by a large gathering at the airport. But their fans were there to lynch them!

Rather than heaping praise on our players for essentially nothing more than turning up at the party, we need to ensure that those lessons be heeded before we decide where Bermuda cricket goes from here.

Nobody disputes that our players didn’t give it their best shot, their level of commitment was admirable and anybody who followed closely the build-up to the competition over the past couple of years, as did the reporters on this newspaper, will tell you there was nothing more coach Gus Logie could have done to extract more effort.

Without Logie’s meticulous preparation and attention to detail, the end result doesn’t bear thinking about.

But let’s not pretend that while our bunch of amateurs were always on a hiding to nothing from the best players in the world, we couldn’t have done better.

Other Associate nations faced the same enormous challenge and generally acquitted themselves reasonably well although ultimately it was only Ireland, a side Bermuda are capable of beating, who seriously threatened the big guns.

If they’re honest, what Bermuda’s players will admit is that they didn’t fulfil their potential.

Whether they were star-struck, suffering from stage fright or simply over-awed by the whole cricket circus, it doesn’t matter. Their performances on the field didn’t reflect their ability or justify months of hard work and sacrifice.

As former England coach David Lloyd pointed out in the blunt manner one would expect from a dour Lancastrian, Bermuda at times looked no better than an average club side.

Flaws in batting technique were cruelly and quickly exposed by some of the fastest and most destructive bowlers in the world, while our own bowlers couldn’t be expected to trouble opposing batsmen who come up against far more formidable attacks day in day out.

And therein lies Bermuda’s dilemma.

Taking on the likes of Guernsey, Lloyds of London and Trinidadian club sides, as Bermuda have done over the past year, isn’t going to cut it. We can’t learn a great deal from those contests.

And while we can learn an awful lot from our recent World Cup opponents, it’s debatable whether wallopings from the likes of Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh do more harm than good.

What seems to be required, as both ICC Development Manager Richard Done and Lloyd suggested last week, is something inbetween . . . more games against national ‘A’ teams and national Under-19 sides.

On top of that we have to continue to send our best youngsters to High Performance Camps, Malachi Jones being the next obvious candidate for such exposure.

And essentially, as mentioned in this column last week, we need to quickly improve facilities here at home, ensure that we can play these same sides on a first class wicket, and thus provide more opportunities for all of our leading players to play at a higher level rather than just those who are privileged to tour overseas.

But if we accept that our team in Trinidad did a great job and couldn’t have done any better, as some seem to feel, then cricket in Bermuda’s going nowhere.