England v New Zealand Report Card
Featuring refusing to defend, dying formats, part-time bowler variations and missing limericks
Refusing To Defend
Grade: A
It’s World Cup time again! Exciting! It’s been weeks since we’ve had one of those.
Of course, most of the recent ones have been T20 World Cups, which are fine in their way. But they lack the gravitas of a proper, full-scale ODI tournament. Why, any old team having a bit of a thrash with no previous form or expectations can inexplicably win one of those.
But enough about Australia’s 2020 T20 World Cup triumph. We’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about the men’s ODI World Cup, and we haven’t had one of those in ages.
Those of you who can remember the before times will recall that England won the last World Cup (insert your own asterisks in the preceding sentence, depending on your national allegiances and/or levels of sustained saltiness). However, if you think that means they’re here in India to defend it, you couldn’t be more mistaken.
Before the tournament began, Jos Buttler - England captain and number one ranked player on the ‘ICC Most Likely To Be Called ‘Josh’ Rankings’ (Josh Hazlewood: 2, Jasprit Bumrah: 3, Josh Inglis: 17) - spoke to the media. There he informed them that he didn’t want England to be referred to as the ‘defending champions’, explaining “It’s probably the word I don’t like: I want us to attack.”
I unironically adore how mad this is. “We refuse to defend our title because it uses the word ‘defence’, which is not what we’re about. We shall instead be relentlessly attacking the prospect of the future absence of our title.”
Great mindset. Great, mad mindset.
Dying Formats
Grade: D-
England opened the tournament with a match against New Zealand at a stadium that holds somewhere between 100,000 and 3 million fans.
Or, as it turned out for this match, far, far fewer than that. Instead, crowds stayed away from the tournament opener in droves. (Although that didn’t prevent the attendee of this match still delaying play at one point by walking behind the bowler’s arm.)
The absence of people who could be bothered attending the tournament opener continued to feed into the narrative that ODIs are a dying format and that this may therefore be the last ODI World Cup ever.
Fighting back against this prediction, however, was Ben Stokes, who loves nothing more than single-handedly saving formats of cricket with his unique blend of style, panache and messianic bloodymindedness. He was left out of this first match with a recurrence of his ‘my body essentially no longer works’ injury.
That didn’t prevent him from sitting on the bench, though, seemingly wearing a beard of bees. You try to tell me that cricket fans aren’t interested in that, and I’ll laugh in your idiot face. (Over-the-top from me? Yes, but that’s how passionate I am about facial apiary.)
Part-Time Bowler Variations
Grade: B+
What Stokes and the other member of the crowd got to watch was England stutter and stumble their way to 9/282 from their fifty overs. Every time they looked to get going, somebody would get out, often to Glenn Phillips.
Phillips was magnificent, bowling at first in sunglasses and beard like an absolute hero, hitting the stumps of Moeen Ali. Later, he returned, showing off his subtle variations by bowling without sunglasses, but still with beard, and hitting the stumps of Joe Root. Phillips, regularly hitting the stumps like some kind of cooler, beardier, occasionally more sunglassed Mitchell Starc.
It was all a welcome distraction from the commentary of Sachin Tendulkar, who was determined to put the ‘dul’ back in Tendulkar, blathering on with tedious Sachinecdotes about the kinds of pad he liked to use. Or some damn thing. I spaced out for a bit there.
Luckily, New Zealand had other part-timers also taking wickets to snap us back to reality. Rachin Ravindra came on to bowl, was smashed around for a few fours and sixes by Harry Brook, and then went for an interesting variation of his own by instead having Brook caught in the deep.
The wicket was enough to have Stokes throw his head back in despair. “I didn’t take your spot in the squad so you could take Jason Roy’s spot in the squad for this, Harry!” he wailed.
Oh, and New Zealand’s proper bowlers also took wickets too. Good-o. Here’s your medal, lads.
Missing Limericks
Grade: C
England threw the new ball to Chris Woakes and Sam Curran. Carelessly, however, they’d selected Overseas Woakes for this tournament, and Devon Conway took him for ten runs from his first over. Look, I know India is technically overseas from an England perspective, but they should at least try to smuggle England Woakes over there one time.
Curran, in contrast, did that thing where he exhausts me just by watching him bustle around full of energy and gumption. Will Young decided not to put up with those antics either, tickling one down leg side first ball. Rightly so. Slow down, Sam.
(On the other hand, Sam Curran’s shirt reads ‘SCURRAN’, which sounds like some kind of disgusting Mos Eisley slang for womp rats. So that one’s a point in his favour.)
Nevertheless, after a couple of maidens from Curran, Buttler had a word to him about the whole ‘not defending’ thing, and Conway and Ravindra then put on an unbeaten 273 run partnership to win the match by nine wickets and 82 balls.
Ordinarily, this would be where I’d put my ‘Morpheus Off The Short Run’ segment, in which I attempt to compensate for my shameful need for slumber by limericking the portion of the match I missed. Expect plenty of those going forward, as I have spirited jousts with the 11pm innings break over the next seven or so weeks.
On this occasion, however, I saw the first dozen overs of the innings, and, based on the next morning scorecard, the bit I slept through seemed like a straight line extrapolation of that.
You’re not getting a limerick for that, people. For one thing, how many words rhyme with ‘straight line extrapolation’? Fewer than the number of people in the crowd at this match, I’d suggest.
So here we go. No guarantees on how many of the World Cup matches I’ll cover. But I’ll do all the Australian ones, for sure, and a smattering of others, based primarily on the limitations of my social life. I’ll probably put one a week out from behind the paywall. For the rest, you’ll have to cough up a paid subscription. Yes, that sounds disgusting. But you can do it. I have faith in you.
