England vs Netherlands- Wow this wasnt in the script at all that the Netherlands were going to push England right to the penultimate over as England just got over the line. England had to chase 292 and England did it with only 8 bowls to spare and won by 6 wickets. The person who gave them all that trouble is Ryan ten Doeschate who did an amazing all round preformance by taken 2 wickets with the ball but really shown with the bat with 119 off 110 balls. The Dutch was helped by some poor England bowling and even worse fielding. It was one of the worst fielding performances by England for a very long time.
Lets have a look at the England failures-
Fielding- If the Ashes when England played so well and such a well drilled side this was the complete opposite. The image which summed up there fielding was when Swann tossed a bowl up and Ten Doeschate made up of his rare mistakes and lofted a ball right in the air Pietersen and Anderson went running after the ball and then by not communicating neither went for the ball and the ball bounced in the middle of those 2 players without an attempt to catch it. Swann face was like thunder.
Everything which was right in the Ashes went horribly wrong here as there innings had bad mis-fields, lots of poor wicketkeeping and dropped catches easy and hard. To top it all off an mistake which to most people can be unthinkable is when Broad bowled the captain Borren the umpires had to recall him because England didnt have enough men within the circle. They only had 3 when they should have had 4.
Bowling- That wasnt too much clever. With the exception of Swann who bowled quite well 10 over for 35 runs and 2 wickets and maybe Bresnan only conceding 49 for 1 wicket off his 10 the others really did let the team down. Anderson normally the go to bowler when things are going wrong was an big problem for the English. He was bowling full tosses, too many easy balls to hit, not enough variety and even bowling a lot of no-balls.
Anderson's figures showed that in conceding 72 runs in his 10 overs. Broad did not have a good game either as he failed (apart from one spell) to get any control, aggression and England needed him to take a lead as Anderson was failing and he didnt seem to be able to. His 10 overs conceded 65 runs with 2 maiden overs for 2 wickets. But he got those 2 wickets when damage was already done. Collingwood is an key part of an 4 bowling attack he needs to make up the 5 bowling option put his problem was that he was bowling too many of the same bowls. He kept bowling cutters and the batsman got use to it and it was to 2 set batsman and he got easy to play. He did get one wicket but it was more Cooper giving his wicket away then getting a wicket. He ended up with 8 overs for 46 runs with that sole wicket. Finally Pietersen well he bowled juicy full tosses for the batsman to have big shots at and they did and for that reason only bowled 2 overs for 19.
But saying all there failures England we should not take away the Netherlands push and drive and how they stuck at there job. They were really worked hard, batted tremendously and showed associate sides were no mugs. Apart from Zuiderent (who scored 1 and Kervezee (who scored 16) everyone contributed to the score and his an massive 292 on this very good batting pitch. It was a really good team effort.
England chase started off really well. The new opening partnership of Strauss and Pietersen got England off to an flyer as they were hitting 4s all over the park. They had a 50 run partnership off 49 bowls and before you knew it they also had the 100 partnership up within 102 balls. At this rate they were going to make there target easy with all there wickets in tack. Strauss lead from the front got a quick fire 50 off 34 balls. Then a left arm spinner came on and the old problem for Pietersen came up again as he got out to them Seelaar bowled a quicker bowl which angled back into him and he lobbed a catch to the captain Borren.
Trott came in and kept the score ticking over. He was his usual self by not hurrying along scoring where he can. The problem for England though that the run rate was slowly creeping up as Trott and Strauss were not getting the boundaries and the impatient blew out on Strauss as tried to loft Bukhari out of the ground but found the fielder and it was caught and he gave his wicket away when he was on for another century. Out for 88.
Bell had come to the crease and had started off slowly just like Trott. It seemed like the pitch had got slower and it was harder to get balls away and the 4s were not coming but more worrying for England was the score wasnt ticking over either there were a lot of dot balls coming in. The rate went as high as over 7 an over. Then England were given another blow as Trott got stumped off a wide bowl from ten Doeschate and England were wobbling a bit. This brought out an out of form Collingwood. Not long after Trott went out Bell also went to the same bowler as he was bowled as he tried to hit a ball in the offside and mis-judged it and went straight through him which brought Bopara out in the middle. England were 241-4 at this stage, the rate was going up and England had 2 new batsman at the crease.
At the early part of there innings Collingwood and Bopara wasnt pretty or nice to watch as they were grinding 1s and 2s as they could not find any rhythm but slowly they were finding the gap. They got it down to needing 13 runs off 12 balls. The first ball of the penultimate over hit the ball over the deep fielder and hit it for 6. It was the first time when England could say for sure that they were going to win the match. They were ahead of the rate and Bopara had the last shot hit away for 4 runs to win the match. It was heart break for the Dutch and relive for the English but it wont him a world cup but the most important thing was they got the job done for England.
Strauss admitted England's performance was not good enough and rated there performance out 4 out of 10. A stat that they didnt expect to here is that chase was the 3rd highest chase in world cup history. England move on to Bangalore for a match against India on Sunday. England will have to play 100 times better than they did here otherwise they will get hammered against the Indians who look really good against Bangladesh and will be fired up playing there first match on home soil against the old enemies England. For the Netherlands they move onto the capital of India (Dehli) to play the West Indies on Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment