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.
