KEY POINTS:
Cricket's World Cup scored an early victory in Jamaica as it proved once and for all that getting it right on the night spoils all the fun when it comes to opening ceremonies.
Sport's obsession with opening ceremony perfection, led by an Olympic movement that thinks it's competing with Cirque du Soleil, has just about ruined the fine art of running a really dodgy ribbon cutter.
What the superstars who run the Olympics just can't understand is that when it comes to pre-match entertainment, letting off a squillion dollars worth of fireworks doesn't hold a roman candle to a bag of double happies going off by mistake in the infield.
You can't plan for all the boo-boos of course, because then they're not boo-boos. What you've got to do is lay the sort of groundwork that enables them to happen.
Instead of hiring award winning Italians in flash suits, making a fleet of Mercedes available and getting corporate America to fund the shindig, the idea is to put the ceremony in the hands of local scout groups, give them a couple of bus passes, and ignore the electricity bill the week before the tournament kicks off.
Where did opening ceremonies start going wrong? I'm not sure. But they are truly worthy of a much greater lack of attention than they get these days.
The thing is that flashy opening ceremonies encourage a let down, and often go completely against the grain of what follows.
Take last year's winter Olympics for instance. Once you've seen Carla Bruni, Sophia Loren and Susan Sarandon in the same room as a Ferrari doing burnouts, it's hard to get worked up watching a bloke in a boiler suit tramping through the snow for three days.
So the cricket World Cup has put opening ceremonies back where they belong, happily surviving on crepe paper, bottles of glue and serrated scissors. Hell, you could almost see the staples and probably would have if they had bothered to turn the lights on.
The only mystery was how this extravaganza cost $2.9m - unless Jimmy Cliff is getting $1.4 million per song these days.
Because every expense appeared to be spared, right down to the TV nametags which announced that every second person on screen was apparently named Arrow.
There were scary moments of course, when Olympic-type perfectionism almost overwhelmed the evening, when the ceremony threatened to live up to the commentary delivered by a woman who must have been parked in her hotel room watching a Cirque de Soleil highlights package.
When Gary Sobers came out to officially open the event, a name tag came up on the screen announcing him as Sir Garfield Sobers. And the name taggers appeared to get their Prime Ministers spot on.
Apart from those unfortunate moments though, everything else was spotlessly not on and enhanced by the other commentator, a bloke who sounded as though his lips were stitched together by bungee rope.
A few highlights ...
Holding the march past of teams in the dark allowed viewers to relax instead of picking through the lineups to see who was walking next to who and working out who wasn't there. Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, was then interviewed behind the tractor shed.
The microphones failed at inappropriate times, like at the beginning, during the middle and at the end.
There was, of course, a Bob Marley tribute, an essential part of any cricket tournament. Music played a major part, from an Irish fiddler to South African reggae star Lucky Dube and a woman who was held together by one of John Travolta's old disco suits.
Brian Lara delivered the players' oath after climbing scaffolding in the dark, while Steve Bucknor announced that - finally - umpires would try to do their best.
Sir Garfield delivered his lines with all the joy of a man who has just found out his daughter is engaged to a Tony Soprano type. He looked absolutely petrified, as if he knew something about the construction of the stage.
As for the down moments ... international cricket is never quite the same when Richie Benaud isn't involved and you can't over-emphasise the value of a white safari suit when lighting is at a premium. He might at least have been allowed to walk across the stage, even if they insisted on calling him Arrow.
But apart from that, it was a marvellous occasion. It concluded when someone ignited a couple of sky rockets and the final light bulb was turned off as screen credits that would have done a Hollywood blockbuster proud rolled on and on.
The great news, from New Zealand's point of view, is that Shane Bond made it through the ceremony without injuring his back, although he was due for tests late last night and the results will only be known this morning.
There were grave fears for Bond's health, especially as Craig McMillan was not only in the vicinity but also wearing dark glasses.
All in all, a tremendous success, and a most promising start to what is shaping as a fantastic tournament.
As the commentator put it so brilliantly: "Blrbble blrbble blub blub blub blub blub."
