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Their title defence all but over, England will look for a reversal in fortunes when they meet familiar foes Australia in Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium on Saturday. With four wins from six outings, Australia are currently third on the points table while Jos Buttler-led England are languishing at the bottom, their solitary win in six games coming against Bangladesh.
Australia and fourth-placed New Zealand are currently level on points (8) and England will need to win all their remaining three fixtures to get to eight points and only then will net run rate and other permutations to come into the picture. Another motivation for England will be to finish in the top eight and qualify for the 2025 Champions Trophy set to take place in Pakistan.
Perhaps more than the losses themselves, England will be haunted by the manner of their defeats. In six games, they have batted their full 50 overs only twice — against New Zealand in their opening game in Ahmedabad, and against Bangladesh in Dharamsala, where Dawid Malan got England’s only hundred of the tournament so far.
Across the other four losses, England batted 40.3 overs against Afghanistan, 22 against South Africa, 33.2 against Sri Lanka and 34.5 overs against India. Barring Malan, no English batter averages more than 30 at this World Cup. Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes, and Liam Livingstone have failed to live up to the expectations.
“I think the problem is that we’ve been crap,” Stokes said candidly at the pre-match presser. “Everything we’ve tried throughout this World Cup, through trying to put pressure back onto the opposition in a way in which we know or trying to soak up the pressure in a different way, which we know we’ve done before and been successful with, it’s just not worked.”
Australia began their campaign with consecutive losses but the five-time champions soon found their bearings and are coming into Saturday’s match on the back of a four-match unbeaten run. Led by the seasoned David Warner (413 runs at an average of 68.83), they have racked up 367/9, 399/8, and 388 in their last three matches. The absence of big-hitting dup Mitchell Marsh and Glenn Maxwell though will put their firepower to test.
While Maxwell will miss the match due to concussion — he fell off a golf cart in a freak accident — Marsh has flown home owing to personal reasons.
“Yeah, it’s not ideal. Both have been star players of the tournament at different times,” Australia skipper Pat Cummins said.
The 30-year-old pacer also expressed surprise over England’s rotten run. “They’ve got some class players and performed really well in these kinds of tournaments over the last few years. A little bit surprised in terms of what’s gone wrong, but these tournaments are pretty fickle, sometimes the best-looking teams just don’t start off well and then find it hard to kind of gain ground,” he said.
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