The World Cup gets under way with an opening ceremony at Bangabandhu National Stadium in Dhaka, to be described no doubt as "glittering", the like and extravagance of which will not have been seen in Bangladesh before. Apparently among others more appropriate to the hosts, it is to be headlined by the rock star Bryan Adams, whose anthem Summer Of '69, may not be a eulogy to the time he got his first real six-string (he would have been nine when Jimmy quit the band they formed at school and Jody got married) so much as a celebration of Yorkshire winning the seven-year-old Gillette Cup and Lancashire taking the inaugural 40-over Sunday League title. Limited overs cricket has come on a bit since the best days of his life.
Alas, I shan't be there to witness these ceremonials. Actually I'm not a bit sorry because although I did enjoy a few – such as that which preceded the 2007 World Cup, the best part of the whole event – I have an aversion to opening ceremonies, particularly those at sporting events in which enormous sums of money are spent on what is little more than an exercise in willy-waving.
The lighting of the Olympic flame cuts the mustard, of course, but that is genuinely iconic. But not the choreography, special effects, lasers, fireworks and showbiz stars that are deemed de rigueur for any large tournament. It is unfair to equate the millions spent on these excesses with schools or hospitals not built for lack of funds, but legitimate to query whether money might better be spent on sporting facilities (two grand will buy an artificial cricket pitch in Afghanistan, as Guardian readers will know) rather than, say, Mr Adams, however highly he might be revered in that part of the world.
And you don't pitch up to a sporting occasion to hear your national anthem sung by Christina Aguilera in a manner that makes fingernails on a blackboard seem a pleasure.
Maybe it is because of the fact that by and large cricket, operating on smaller budgets, tends to do these things so ineptly by comparison. This is the 10th edition of cricket's World Cup and I'm not sure any prelude has progressed entirely without hitch. For the first three, all in England, hazy memory suggests nothing specific beyond a speech or two in front of the assembled teams, which means that the first real attempt at a spectacular was in India in 1987.
This, I recall well enough for it took place at a Delhi hockey stadium. The teams were lined up in the arena and then marched up into the back of a stand where, in the shadows, they shook hands with someone who may or may not have been Rajiv Ghandi who, not without good reason as it transpired four years later, was under the strictest security.
The symbolic (apparently) release of hundreds of white balloons followed and this did not go well. They were contained in a line of cages of a kind that once would have been used for mailbags on a station platform, and from the outset something was not quite right. We twigged: they were all skulking at the bottom of the cages rather than bursting to get out. Someone had puffed them up with a hand pump so when released they skittered in the breeze along the ground.
Those who recall the scene in that year's television adaptation of Porterhouse Blue, where David Jason's college porter Skullion is seen manically stamping on hundreds of inflated condoms in the college grounds, can picture the scene that followed. Now that was entertainment.
Australia 1992 was mercifully free of ceremony, and it took the 1996 opener at Eden Gardens to redress the balance, where the $3m Son et lumière laser show (I think Jean Michel Jarre may have collaborated) had not catered for a strong wind billowing the huge, filmy-fabric projection screen like the sails on the Cutty Sark. It was so humiliating there was talk of Jagmohan Dalmiya, head of Bengal Cricket Association, being prosecuted for misappropriation of public funds.
By 2003 things were back on track with a cut-price $2m buying an uneventful few hours of entertainment at Newlands. Truth be known it needed it, for the nadir of opening ceremonies, the absolute pits, the apotheosis of ineptness, had been reached in England in 1999, where a budget that would not have kept a family of four in food for a week bought a box of Brocks fireworks, and Tony Blair claiming to have seen things that never actually happened. If only we could have recognised that trait for what it was at the time.