The semi final was lost in the last five of our innings and the first five of theirs. There’s a fair amount of luck involved in T20 – another day, those full tosses we hit down fielders’ throats would have cleared the rope and Roy would have been caught first over, chipping Anderson to short third man. That didn’t happen and there’s not a lot of time to come back in twenty overs, even if Sodhi’s two wickets teased that a good old fashioned England collapse was just around the corner. They were better on the day – and have done a fair old reinvention job on themselves. Cuss it all.
The painful bit is that going into today’s match it felt like only our second major international trophy was there for the taking but there’s a lot to be proud of – Sodhi and Santner top the wicket taking table, we look supremely organised and Kane Williamson has slipped into the captaincy with aplomb. We probably needed a few more batsmen to be in really good form going into the finals to be fair, but we weren’t far away.
This was a tough tournament to play, with more time spent in airport travel lounges than the nets, and surfaces more reminiscent of early 70s football penalty areas than cricket pitches, but we handled it well, until today. From the couch the team culture looks as strong as ever, and a challenging trip like this will bring the group together.
So are we a proper T20 side now? During the great BLACKCAPS revolution of the last three years, we’ve climbed the rankings in Tests and ODIs, but been nowhere in the shits and giggles format (but then we’d hardly played it lately until this summer). It felt like we SHOULD be better at it – half the team is playing the IPLs etc and we’ve got no shortage of big hitters and crafty bowlers. It looks like we get it at last but now we probably won’t play too much of this format until the six months before the next WT20.
Ah well. It’s kind of the beauty of this tournament that it’s over fast and we can flush the dunny and move on, as a great man once said. Now there’s a long break until August, when we play South Africa there in two Tests and we’ll get to see what a Kane Williamson BLACKCAPS Test team looks like. Can’t wait.
Excuse me, WHY do you still have your pads on? #EngvNZ pic.twitter.com/Cb3ns9hl9D
— Richard Irvine (@richirvine) March 30, 2016
