England hoping to emulate Shah's team of 20 years ago
Australia won the first Youth World Cup in 1988 but it wasn't until 10 years later that the first Under 19 World Cup was properly convened under the ICC umbrella.
The tournament was held in South Africa, with 16 countries competing to lift the trophy. It featured several emerging talents who would go on to become household names in the years ahead: Chris Gayle finished as the leading run-scorer, while his West Indies teammate Ramnaresh Sarwan, who later become much better known as a batsman, took 16 wickets with his leg-spin to emerge as the competition's joint-highest wicket-taker.
England had future Test players Graeme Swann, Rob Key, Owais Shah and Chris Schofield in their ranks but had endured a disappointing warm-up series against South Africa and weren't considered among the favourites.
In the World Cup itself, England lost to Bangladesh but beat Pakistan and New Zealand, and arrived at the end of the second group stage needing to beat Australia out of sight to have even the slimmest chance of progressing to the final on net run rate. An Australian side including future internationals Marcus North and Michael Klinger had won all five matches at a canter up to that point. They were hot and England were lukewarm.
However, after England bowled Australia out for 147 the unthinkable suddenly became possible. If they could reach their target in 33 overs or fewer they would qualify for the final. Stephen Peters, who would go on to have a successful county career with Essex, Worcestershire and Northamptonshire, hit a rapid half-century to set up the chase before Paul Franks, who earned a solitary ODI cap in 2000, and Shah finished the job.
With momentum on their side, England went on to beat a New Zealand side that featured James Franklin, Hamish Marshall, Lou Vincent and Kyle Mills by seven wickets in the final, with Peters hitting a century and Shah scoring an unbeaten fifty.
"We didn’t have a great start but when we needed to win games, we did," recalls Shah. "We didn’t tend to focus on the little things like how we were eating or how we were training. It was more about playing the way 19-year-olds should be playing cricket. We didn’t have 25 support staff monitoring every little thing we did. It was a wonderful tournament and definitely a highlight of my career."
England haven't lifted the ICC U19 CWC since. Could 2018 be the year they emulate Owais Shah's side of 20 years ago?
The ICC U19 CWC in New Zealand gets underway on Saturday 13 January