It turns out that I need to go to New Zealand and, by the purest coincidence, will be in Auckland during the final week of the cricket World Cup, when the two semi-final games and the final will be played. The first semi-final will actually be in Auckland itself and one of the teams will likely be New Zealand (my second favorite team after Sri Lanka), provided it wins its quarterfinal game against the fourth place team in group B that has yet to be determined.
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The tournament is rapidly approaching the quarterfinal knockout stage and the rankings in each group are firming up enabling fairly specific speculations about the likely match ups in the knockout rounds. (Brackets are from this Wikipedia article.)
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Bangladesh finally put an end to England’s misery in this World Cup by defeating them in an exciting game that ended this morning (my time). England won the toss and sent Bangladesh in and did well to restrict them to 275/7 off their 50 overs. As we have seen, a first innings score of 300 has become the minimum target, with 350 preferred on these batting-friendly pitches. Bangladesh had scored only 197/4 at the 40-over mark, and while a century by Mahmudullah and 89 by Mushfiqur Rahim pushed the score up, they could not step on the gas enough in the last ten overs as the England bowlers restricted them to just 78 more runs even though they had wickets in hand.
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Yesterday’s game between Australia and Sri Lanka was another high scoring one with Australia batting first and scoring 376/9 off their 50 overs, not the highest in the tournament but a very formidable one nonetheless. Given that teams batting second have chased down scores of 300 several times already, the bar for the team batting first has been raised to around 350 and Australia met it comfortably the standard way, scoring around 150 in the first 30 overs without losing more than a couple of wickets, and then piling on for the last 20 overs. Steven Smith and captain Michael Clarke did the first part and Glenn Maxwell and Shane Watson were the architects of the second part, with Maxwell being ruthless and scoring the second fastest century in World Cup history off just 51 balls.
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Yesterday’s two games both produced upset results. The first one was Pakistan defeating the highly favored South African team in a low scoring game. Pakistan batted first and scored just 222, a target that the powerful batting line up of South Africa should have had little difficulty chasing. But the Pakistani bowlers were on fire and apart from a score of 77 by the SA captain AB de Villiers, the other batsmen couldn’t seem to stick around long enough to have an impact in the rain-affected game and they were all out for 202 in just 33.3 overs.
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This has been a tough World Cup for Scotland. This is their third appearance at this tournament and they are still seeking their first win. They came close against Afghanistan earlier but fell short by a whisker. Then yesterday they played Bangladesh and batting first, scored 318/8 with a fine 156 by opener Kyle Coetzer. They had to have been confident of their chances at the break but Bangladesh targeted this score in a clinical fashion and reached it quite comfortably with 6 wickets and 11 balls to spare, even though they had never successfully chased such a high score before.
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Scheduling

It seems like the organizers of this World Cup tournament have dragged it out too long, with many days featuring just a single game, making it hard to sustain a high level of interest. Yesterday there was not even a single game. There is no obvious reason why there should not be at least two and preferably three games each day. As long as a team has two days break (plus an extra day if they need to travel to a distant venue), that should be enough spacing. Like all seemingly inexplicable things, the real reason probably has to do with money, possibly to maximize TV viewing.
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After the previous day’s heart-stopping, low-scoring, bowler-dominated thriller between Australia and New Zealand, when fortunes were reversed time and again, the game between England and Sri Lanka was a stark contrast, a sedate batsman-dominated game that produced a different kind of engrossing game in which Sri Lanka eventually cruised to an easy victory after being set a formidable challenge by England.
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What a game!

A match between two of the three favorites to win the trophy proved to be one that was worthy of all the hype and New Zealand eked out a win in one of the closest matches ever, replying to Australia’s 151 off 32.2 overs with 152/9 off 23.1 overs. What was surprising was that in a tournament dominated by batsmen and high scoring, this time it was the fast bowlers who dominated, with both teams barely scoring 150 and neither side coming anywhere close to using up their allotted 50 overs.
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Yesterday’s game was the most lop-sided one of the tournament so far, with South Africa defeating West Indies by the huge margin of 267 runs. While the result was not unexpected, since SA has been one of the favored nations to win the tournament and WI has been in a slump generally, recent performances had suggested a close game and nothing like the blowout that happened.
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