Flashing by

Goodness, but this 20-20 is fast! Take a few days off and half the tournament has gone. Since I last posted (about the warm-up win over India), four games have gone by. However, the tournament is only now beginning for New Zealand.

The first of those four games I missed was our warm up loss against Australia. A game that would have been nice to win, but it wasn’t even part of the tournament itself.

The second game was the crazy 7-7 game against Scotland. Having a game reduced to 7 overs was probably the best thing Scotland could have hoped for and they still lost heavily. The points for this game were always going to be a gift to New Zealand; the game didn’t even need to be played or even scheduled. NZ could just have started the round on 2 points.

Given that Scotland was no competition in Group D, NZ and South Africa were always going to qualify for the super 8s. So the game between them was irrelevant for the tournament, as widely reported. Not only were they both certain to qualify for the next round, but because no points are carried through to the next round, the only thing that mattered was qualifying. So New Zealand loses (agonisingly), but still the competition hasn’t started.

The next match was the first match of the super 8. As it happens, this was another game where the points could have simply been handed to New Zealand.

Assuming also that Sri Lanka and Pakistan, the other two teams in New Zealand’s super 8 group, have no trouble against Ireland, the super 8, from our standpoint is simply a contest amongst three teams, with New Zealand yet to play either of their opponents. The first of these games is tonight in fact, against Pakistan. Now this match matters.

Pakistan has already lost to Sri Lanka. Therefore, if they lose to New Zealand they will be elminated. Whereas a loss by New Zealand will mean they will need to beat Sri Lanka to be in with a chance of qualifying for the semis. (It will be down to run rates in this case.)

So now the tournament begins.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 8:23 pmand is filed under World 20-20. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Flashing by”

  • Christopher Poshin David Says:
    June 14th, 2009 at 3:25 am

    Cheers,

    long time..no read….

    i’ll say that the Black caps have a better chance than India….but They’ll lose in the semis as usual…

  • profernity Says:
    June 14th, 2009 at 9:45 am

    Another World Cup (if not in name, then style), another loss to Pakistan. And what a loss! No agnoising one-run defeat here, no sir, just a good old-fashioned towelling. Excuse my bitterness, but we’re always doing this against Pakistan and Sri Lanka, who we meet next. We might not even do the usual semi-final exit, can you believe that?

    Or perhaps this is the match where they get it all out of their system, and storm through to the finals.

    Still optimistically hoping for the latter,

    Susan

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