Srinagar: Defending Champion England has fallen into all sorts of trouble after getting trounced over by South Africa in a lopsided contest. This is second consecutive defeat of England after losing its previous game against Afghanistan.
After winning the toss, England asked South Africa to bat – perhaps in a hope to restrict the team, which had earlier lost against the Netherlands, to some reachable total.
They even had tasted a bit of it after an early fall of in form Quinton de Cock, but that was all they had for the day as the other batters went on to pummel the English bowling attack with complete disdain.
It particularly was Heinrich Klassen’s ton of mere 61 deliveries and a timely half century from Marco Jansen who went all guns blazing to bring English bowling attack on its knees.
With a literal carnage by the Klassen-Jansen, South Africa scored 399 in stipulated 50 overs.
Soon as English came into bat, they fell one after another even as poor form of Bairstow and Buttler continued. The other batters could hardly negotiate the pace and accuracy of Jansen and Ngidi albeit some cameos from Atkinson and Wood helping the team reach 170 – thereby losing the match by 229 runs.
The consecutive defeat of England has brightened the chances of Sri Lanka, who earlier in the day defeated Netherlands, to break into Super 4 – with highly likely contention of India, New Zealand, South Africa.
With this defeat of England, Pakistan on the other too may fancy it’s chance to break into the Super 4, if at all goes on to wins it’s upcoming matches.
All in all, given the performance, India and New Zealand, who are to play against each other tomorrow, seem to be two among the four teams to play Semis while the rest of the two slots remain unbooked among Australia, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Pakistan – and it needs to be seen which two teams prevail to give it a shot in the Semis’ – fingers crossed! Ciao
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