Ireland captain Andrew Balbirnie has laughed off suggestions of "gamesmanship" in their shock win over England at the T20 World Cup.
Ireland won the match by five runs via the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) method after rain forced the game to a premature end during the 15th over of England's innings.
At the time, Ireland were two overs behind the over rate and Balbirnie admitted England were perhaps just "one ball away" of getting ahead of DLS after Moeen Ali began striking it cleanly. And England captain Jos Buttler suggested their slow over rate was an example of "gamesmanship" from Ireland.
"Yeah, it's certainly something, whether it's gamesmanship... they knew the rain was coming and could slow the game up," he said. "I think we had lost the game before that point.
"If we were ahead, they wouldn't have been slowing the game down." But when the suggestion was put to Blabirnie, he quickly brushed it off.
"It wasn't [gamesmanship]," he stated. "Our lads are just very slow running around the pitch. It was a huge ground, there was a bit of noise.
"I was trying my best to go through the overs quickly. I didn't want to rely on the weather.
"I've seen enough games of cricket to know we can't rely on the weather. It coming in when it did and it's in the history books, so it worked out really well for us."
"If it was [gamesmanship], I would have slowed it down even more and we would have been down five or six overs."
