South Africa v England, 3rd T20 Liveblog
All eyes are obviously on the World T20 at the moment. But if England lose to Sri Lanka on Saturday, Matthew Mott and his team’s attention will immediately turn to 50-over cricket again. With that in mind, Rob Stephenson discusses how things are shaping up ahead of our World Cup defence in India next year. The side has, after all, lost both its inspirational skipper and the man-of-the-match in that memorable Lord’s final against New Zealand in 2019… Bizarrely, even for the...
This year’s abandoned IPL involved a familiar procession at the toss. Meet in the middle, make your call, win the toss, bowl first (unless your name is Rohit Sharma in Chennai). It’s a well-rehearsed act in T20 cricket, almost automatic at this point. So established is the urge to chase that it takes little imagination to guess what the winning captain will politely opt for. With this familiarity, one would expect a matching level of competence. Surely, teams are so used to chasing scores...
Yesterday’s decisive ODI might have ended in defeat, but at least it was an entertaining contest. A 2-3 defeat in India isn’t a bad result considering that Root, Morgan and Archer were missing. However, it’s a bit alarming that we squandered so many excellent starts. What’s going on? Here’s Abhijato with a tongue in cheek perspective … The England white-ball team might have come away empty-handed from both the series they played in India, but their approach...
England’s loss in the first ODI was the latest by-product of England’s approach to playing this format of the game. All-out attack needs to be persisted with, Morgan reasoned, even in the face of reason. This approach almost took them out of World Cup contention in the group stage. But they ended up winning the tournament playing with the same approach anyway. Morgan’s men must be on to something. But there is one qualm to be had with him, which he cannot truly do anything about at the moment...
As soon as I saw the South African total with wickets list I knew we’d win comfortably. It’s just another example of flat tracks producing high scoring but ultimately disappointing boundary fests. Yes Malan’s innings was brutally beautiful but it was totally predictable on that wicket that with our line up a couple would come good. There’s so little pressure on the batsmen when they know they can get away with taking risk after risk against a pretty ordinary attack, If one doesn’t come off another will.
Once again though Roy looked iffy and Tom Currans death bowling was called into question.
Like Marc, saw the score from SA and thought it was either an easy boring win for SA or a canter for flat track hitters .. didn’t bother watching
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