Image Credit- ICC
On Wednesday, in Pune, there will be a smaller
championship up for grabs; in contrast to the one that an amateur English team
won at the European Cricket Championships in Malaga last month, this one isn’t
even an official one. And in the end, they defeated the reigning champions, the
Netherlands, by eight wickets! Put an end to this joke! Cricket has already
returned home!
To be honest, England would be more than pleased to
end this awful campaign at this point. Australia’s 33-run defeat on Saturday
ultimately put an end to their increasingly shaky hold on the 2019 title, but
they still have two more chances to humiliate themselves, first here in Pune
and then in Kolkata on Saturday against a late-surging Pakistani team. As these
matches draw near, they find themselves in a difficult psychological situation.
A pair of wins would be too little, too late for the tarnished reputation of a
once world-beater team, but a loss in either would also mean they are out of
the running for the 2025 Champions Trophy, which would be the ideal BOGOF
downfall.
Therefore, there has never been a better opportunity
for the positive, determined, and extremely resilient Netherlands team to take
on a team with a track record of success on the international scene. Their two
wins in this competition thus far, against South Africa and Bangladesh, have
demonstrated a never-say-die attitude (particularly in their lower-order
batting) that their subsequent opponents have been utterly unable of matching.
Furthermore, they have the history and current form to pull off another upset
against a team that is thought to be better than them after eliminating three
other Test countries—the West Indies, Ireland, and Zimbabwe—just to win a tough
qualifying round in July.
Therefore, you could almost consider Netherlands to be
favourites for this match if desire—almost to the point of desperation—is an
intangible factor in sporting match-ups. However, this is absurd when you
consider what happened when these two sides met in Amstelveen 18 months ago, at
the beginning of Matthew Mott’s tenure as England’s white-ball coach. However,
the unwavering determination with which England set a world record 498 for 4
has vanished, replaced by a stale and unfamiliar approach. Moeen Ali’s usually
candid assessment this week was, “Maybe the writing was on the wall, and
we just didn’t see it,” acknowledging that an elderly team had simply
petered out on the eve of their last reckoning.
But a more existential opportunity has presented
itself to the Netherlands. Aside from the satisfaction of defeating England in
a World Cup, winning the Champions Trophy might stabilise their already
unstable finances, provide them with an incentive to secure long-term sponsors,
and allow them to go through the 2025 competition in order to qualify for the
2027 World Cup. “It adds a massive element to these two games,” the
captain of the Netherlands, Scott Edwards, said the night before the game to
ESPNcricinfo. In addition, he said, “it puts us on a little bit of a
level-playing field” because England is ranked lower than them.