Key events
What an absolute state of affairs this is:
Check out Simon Burnton’s preview.
Preamble
Modern life bombards us with information, demanding us to take positions, then entrench ourselves within them. As a consequence – yes, especially for the professional pronouncers among us – slipping away is the sacred art of saying … I don’t know.
And, with men’s T20 replacing women’s tennis as the world’s least predictable sport, this is a skill on which we’d do well to rely on over the next 12 days. Take England for example, their fearsome batting phutting only to be bailed out by … their battery of spinners? Verily, we do not expletive know.
What we do know, though, is that if England beat Pakistan today, they will be into the semis with a game to spare – a task far easier said that done. Though they’re now at home in Pallekele, while Pakistan are playing their first match away from Colombo, they’ll face a variety of slow bowlers, the kind of which they’ve been struggling against, the tournament’s leading run-scorer in Sahibzada Farhan, and the gloriously destructive Babar Azam.
But of course, T20 being T20, the decisive acts are just as likely to be performed by someone we never expected them of, in way it was impossible to preconceive, to deliver an outcome that feels both surprising and inevitable … or not, no one knows.
Play: 7pm local, 1.30pm GMT