England’s dismal performance against the Proteas, losing by a massive 229 runs – England’s biggest defeat ever in ODIs in terms of runs – in the ICC World Cup Cricket 2023 has by all means, but for some strange and complex combination of factors, ends their dream of ‘bringing it home’ for the second consecutive time.
At this stage of the tournament, the Three Lions find themselves languishing at the precarious eighth position on the table, a meagre net run rate keeping them off the bottom and only having a solitary win to showcase.
the Three Lions find themselves languishing at the precarious eighth position on the table, a meagre net run rate keeping them off the bottom and only having a solitary win to showcase.
Experts do agree that coming into the tournament, this team arguably had the best build up — winning the most recent ODI and T20 World Cups. The team had also retained its core from the successful title winning squad of 2019, tweaking only the captaincy from the now retired Eoin Morgan to Jos Buttler.
High expectations were understandably placed on this team full of superstars, with cricket analysts backing them to go all the way once again. Unfortunately for them, these ‘expectations’ have not materialised so far, and the Ground Zero Post looks at some of the reasons at why the cricket heavyweights have not played to their full strength.
A team full of superstars, but are they really a superstar team?
Ben Stokes. Jos Buttler. Joe Root. These are just some of the names in a long list of names of proven match winners that England’s arsenal is made of. But cricket is a team sport, where team cohesion is crucial for success.
The England XI for the World Cup opener hadn’t played too many games together prior to this and though there was no doubt that the team did not lack individually, their performance as a collective was relatively untried and untested, and this probably came to bite them in the form of a big bee sting on their very first outing itself, totally being outplayed by a very strong New Zealand team.
Absence of Ben Stokes
Not enough that can be said about the cricketing ability of Ben Stokes and limiting his abilities and skills as a cricketer to just a few short paragraphs would be sacrilegious . When the English board declared that the ‘Big Ben’ would be out of action for at least a couple of games, the team’s ability to turn around matches sunk like the seabed following a big tremor.
For the English cricket team, bad omen is when the Big Ben goes mSissing from the field. And it was obvious too with England looking a pale shadow of its usual mighty self, succumbing to heavy defeats, including an embarrassing 69 run loss to Afghanistan. Thankfully, the Big Ben has come back to life just in the nick of time. But will he be able to turn the team’s fortunes around?
Only time will tell.
Apart from standout performers in Dawid Malan and Reece Topley who — to make matters worse — walked off with an injury scare recently, the team has largely underperformed in all departments. Jos Buttler has especially been disappointing with the bat considering his experience and familiarity with the subcontinent, thanks to the IPL. Joe Root has been unable to translate his Test match form to the ODI format and, in the absence of Ben Stokes, the allrounders have also failed to step up.
Jos Buttler was spot on in his assessment of their performance so far, calling it ‘incredibly disappointing’. The World Cup is the big stage and a big team like England would want to let the bygones be bygones, and focus on the games ahead as they try to regroup and recreate some of the magic from their previous title winning campaign of 2019.