Can we share it?
I think the $50 I plonked on RSA will stay with the bookmaker. They should have won- that pitch was hardly a minefield.
I can’t believe the number of games ending with a flurry of wickets.
Well said - after clocking your earlier comments I was all set to steam in here with a suggestion to stick something in a pipe and smoke it, but fair play to you for putting your hand up. This from Cricinfo when RSA has three overs and two wickets in hand to make 8 runs:
…and over the space of four balls, Broady obliged with one, which was more than he managed against Ireland. 
Bum! - that is all…
Save some humble pie for me.
I knew there was a reason why I don’t bet on sport.
Well, England are single handedly trying to liven up the group stages. Our inconsistency at least is consistent.
I nearly posted here when RSA were 50+ for bugger all. I was going to wax lyrical on how badly we were going to get pummelled. Thankfully I was distracted and didn’t.
Can we all just agree that no one will post an autopsy of the English corpse until we know it has definitely deceased. It is starting to make us all look daft.
Man, I hope AK84 hasn’t gone catatonic after the last 5 or 6 overs of the New Zealand innings.
…woohoo! What a fantastic century from Roscoe!
No. But I am leafing through the Pakistan Penal Code to find a provision which allows us to shoot Kamran Akmal.
45/5 in 14.4. You might want to look at some sort of collective punishment instead.
On the bright side, Afridi is in and this is one of the rare occasions when his Death or Glory approach to batting is actually suited to the match situation. At any rate, it should be fun…
…and even as I write that, I flick back to the OBO coverage and find that he’s out for 17. Death, then.
66-6. Ominous.
I wonder what odds you would have got at your local friendly bookmakers for a NZ win by 150+ runs with 10 overs to go in their innings…
And indeed what odds you would have got on some of England’s results at certain moments during the game.
At least Pakistan are edging up into 3 figures. 79 for 6 now.
I really am hoping that this implosion is a one night thing. We are through to the quarters… oh who am I kidding.
Pretty good effort getting up to 192 all out in the end, particularly given where they were after 20 overs.
And now Broad is out of the rest of the Cup with a side strain. Well, you can’t say it hasn’t been an eventful group stage for the English.
I’m really hoping for an England-Pakistan quarterfinal…a matchup of two teams that, depending what day it is, look like winning the whole thing or finishing dead last.
We were the better team for all but 13 overs. That is where we lost (which incidentally is what usually happens in Pakistan matches but the other way around!).
Kamran Akmal is a pathological case and need to be shot (leafing through PPC) but the bowlers forgot how to bowl in the last five overs and with all credit to NZ, the ballls were gifts, begging to be hit, and were. The team was too shell shocked for about 10 overs of the chase and that was it.
All in all, well done to the Kiwis.
This WC is wide open.
I’ve been paying attention to the tourney, but am still familiarizing myself with the scorecard.
On the batters’ scorecard, they show R, M, B, 4’s, 6’s, and SR. I don’t know what the ‘M’ stands for. Also, the lineup has an asterisk next to one player and a cross next to another player. Sometimes they’re both next to the same player (like in the case of Canada in the link above).
What do these 3 things mean?
M is for “minutes batted.” The asterisk denotes the captain of the team, and the cross the wicketkeeper. So Ashish Bagai is both the captain and the wicketkeeper of Canada’s side.
One of the problems with Pakistan and its matches in now, whenever a match goes wildly bad for them a lot of cricket followers (including me) start to wonder “Is this game straight?”
And those thoughts detract from the performance of a player like Taylor.
Akmal was awful behind the stumps - looked like a school kid with that second drop. Taylor’s had his one big innings of the tournament. I have to agree with Cicero’s insinuation of spot fixing which does take the gloss off things from the Kiwi perspective.
So Pakistan’s had their implosion and New Zeland have their win over a higher-ranked team.