After their disappointing start to this World Cup, England wanted to use this game to set a new level of performance, and in a way they did. This was a fresh low, and since arriving in India they have now lost four games, their confidence, their reputation and at times it seems all reason, and it isn’t over yet. In one of India’s most batting-friendly venues, against struggling, injury-ravaged opponents, England won the toss, chose to bat and were skittled for just 156, the lowest total registered on this ground in a one-day international. From there Sri Lanka’s second victory of the tournament was humiliatingly straightforward.
After a fortnight in freefall this was supposed to be the moment England’s bungee rope pulled taut and they started flying upwards. It turned out there were further depths to plumb, and with India next on Sunday they might be a long way from rock bottom yet.
They made three changes for last Saturday’s thrashing by South Africa and there were three more here, with the aim – laughable in hindsight – of bolstering their batting. For the first time in ODIs, and the first time in any format for more than a century, England picked a team without any players younger than 30. Clearly they had concluded, as in a very different context Mike Pence recently said of Vivek Ramaswamy, that now is not the time for on-the-job training. Or alternatively that it would be wise to protect those players who might have another World Cup in them from further scarring.
Because this team is not so much bad as broken. There is no simple sporting explanation for their collapse, in a must-win game, from 45 without loss to 85 for five and onwards, downwards from there, for the way that senior players, primed and pressure-tested, in full knowledge of the team’s position and their own responsibility, so meekly surrendered.
This is not to belittle Sri Lanka, but it certainly helps when your opponents are so willing to beat themselves. Many of those who won the title in 2019 are still in the side but England’s world champions are no more. They have ceased to be. They have not been officially eliminated, but it is only a matter of time and the really painful part of their World Cup starts here, with a period of prolonged and perhaps literally pointless torture. After they had lost three of their first four games the format of this tournament seemed bizarrely charitable, contriving to offer them hope of still qualifying for the semi-finals. After four defeats from five it seems unfathomably cruel, forcing this hollow shell of a team to continue parading around India for another two and a half weeks.
As against South Africa, it had started so well. On that occasion the rosy glow of optimism lasted until the third ball of the sixth over, when Reece Topley shattered a bone in his finger and his team’s fragile confidence snapped with it. This time it took a ball fewer, Dawid Malan ending a promising opening partnership – at one point he and Jonny Bairstow scored six fours in 10 balls and appeared to be having some measure of fun – by getting the thinnest of edges to Angelo Mathews’ third delivery in ODI cricket for three and a half years.
It could, amazingly, have been worse. Bairstow pushed the first ball of the day down the ground for three, but it had flicked a pad on its way into his bat and the review that Sri Lanka discussed and rejected would have found him emphatically out. Ben Stokes survived a review when he was yet to score, was nearly caught, brilliantly, at backward square leg on 12, and was on 13 when he was given out lbw but saved by the gentlest brush of ball on bat, before going on to top-score for England with 43 off 73.
England lost all 10 wickets for 111 runs, some of them really putting the dismal into dismissal. Joe Root ran himself out in search of a nonexistent run; Bairstow clumped a truly miserable shot straight to mid-on; Moeen Ali could not possibly have presented the fielder at backward point with a more straightforward catch, nor Stokes the man at deep midwicket. Perhaps, though, it was Adil Rashid’s departure that best summed up the team’s day, the 35-year-old contriving to be run out at the non-striker’s end off a wide while not attempting a run.
Only two Englishmen have scored more runs in this World Cup than Harry Brook, who was dropped for this game. Eleven have scored more than Liam Livingstone, who replaced him and scored a single to bring his tournament total, in four innings, to 31, and seems not so much out of form but a complete stranger to it. Jos Buttler, excellently caught behind by Kusal Mendis off the outside edge, is averaging 19 and has scored only 10 more runs in the tournament than Mark Wood, England’s No 11.
The only way England might have successfully defended their total was to take a couple of early wickets and hope they were not alone in being prone to collapses. They did their bit, David Willey dismissing Kusal Perera and Mendis for four and 11 respectively, but Sri Lanka refused to do theirs. Pathum Nissanka and Sadeera Samarawickrama came together with their side needing 134 at three an over and made their task look even more trivial than it sounded, both scoring half-centuries as they steered their side to victory with eight wickets, and 146 balls, remaining.
