Perhaps England’s cricketers can now apply the Alex Ferguson Theory of Eternal Non-Defeat to their World Cup endgame. We never actually lose, you see. No. What happens is we simply run out of time to win. And every single one of you, yes all eight of those mathematically superior ICC World Cup co-combatants, are a bunch of lucky clock-watchers.
In reality England have spent the last week acting out their own World Cup at Bernies, a cadaver of a champion team still being marched around the place, features stretched into a ghostly version of game-face, prisoners of a format where you can die your own tournament death but still find yourself forced to meet the dawn all the way from Ahmedabad to Kolkata.
In Pune there was at least was some heat and light in a one-sided defeat of the Netherlands, a muscle memory of the care, energy and collective resources expended in pursuit of white-ball glory. It was no surprise that it should be Ben Stokes who drove England there, with an esprit d’escalier hundred, an innings that thrummed up with perfect timing through the gears, but which will still have felt at times like picking at a raw set of wounds, even as the ball began to disappear over the square boundaries.
England were still lose-curious in this game. They dabbled for a while, batting first and stumbling a little under a low cloak of hot, white Pune mist. The only really perilous moment arrived with another meek dismissal for Jos Buttler, out scything to mid-off in a constricted arc, feet rooted, arms at a stiffly choreographed 45 degrees, the off-drive as expressed through the medium of rigidly formal Irish dancing.
It took 45 overs of England’s innings for the game to turn. Aryan Dutt, who had enjoyed some success with his off-breaks, walked in to bowl the final ball of his final over with England on 257 for six. At which point the game just fell apart.
Dutt produced something horrible, a shoulder-high full toss that floated down in a ghostly parabola, so slow that Stokes had to wait, to force himself to blink, before lifting it over deep square leg with a tactful sense of brusqueness.
The next ball, a free hit, was power-lifted into the sight screen for another six. Stokes had begun the over on 58 off 63 balls, an innings to that point of bloody-minded care, like a man pointedly defrosting the fridge and cleaning out the car boot, because, frankly no one else around here is going to do it.
After which he slipped into overdrive, a display of controlled, even quite tender hitting. The second 50 arrived in 20 balls, as the Netherlands’ bowling, under pressure, alternated between the filthy, the deeply filthy and the merely slightly filthy. A fine and frisky half-century from Chris Woakes helped lift England to 339, which was always out of reach.
What to make of this? There are no dead games. No. Dead. Games. This has been the mantra, repeated so often that somehow along the way the only words that actually emerge out of the fog are “dead game”. This was the closest thing to a graveyard stroll England are going to get. But there was still some vital information here.
Mainly it was a potent reminder of how England worked out how to win in the first place, how they won their biggest games, and what the real omission has been in India.
Which is, for all the talk going hard and then harder still, the muscle-cricket stuff, actually about being smart and playing every situation with the same decisive intelligence. Which may mean going harder, but not when it has tended to matter most.
England won two World Cup finals because Stokes had the forensic game smarts to roll up and down through the gears, to understand the rhythms of the contest, to be explosive only when the doors were ready to be blown off.
He did it again here. Pune had been cloaked in heavy mist all morning, the rolling white canopies of the Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium mirroring the line of the distant grey hills beyond. And it was tough at times. Stokes ran hard. He used his crease furiously. When he levered Bas de Leede over midwicket for six to bring up his 50, it was his first real moment of abandon.
This is the second lesson of Pune: a reminder of just how good Stokes has been as an ODI batter. Since his first hundred in 2016 he averages 53 in this format, and in a way that usually tends to win games. No other England cricketer has so reliably made the opposition fall apart or lose their bearings over such an extended period. Again, it comes to tempo, knowing when to push, when to wait. He is still only 32. Knee permitting, he still looks a genuinely elite player in this form.
And this of course is the third lesson, the sense of trapped energy, of some parallel universe where England clicked, where games were won, where the title defence is still alive. It is of course a bridge too far. England beat a team of part-timers in Pune. The game has moved on. Other teams have accelerated away as they have grown old. But there was at least a snapshot of something here, a reminder of what it took, and of what has been lost in the past three chastening weeks.
