England stayed alive in the Twenty20 World Cup when their regained their composure, and put their defeat against the Dutchmen as bad dream and beat the Pakistanis by 48 runs at the Oval, here on Sunday.
After making 185 for five, England bundled the Pakistanis for 136. Had England lost this one, they would have tumbled out and it would have been galling to them and a terrible setback considering that they were playing in their own backyard.
The Pakistanis put pressure on themselves by their shoddy fielding which enabled the Englishmen to a big score. Pakistan will certainly rue their, which they could have turned to victory if they fielded better.
When the Pakistanis began their chase, they lost wickets at regular intervals and no batsmen really could get going Big guns Saman Butt, Kamran Akmal, Shoaib Malik who made 20 off 21, the highly rated Sahid Afridi and Misbah Ul-Haq all failed to fire and that was that. Only skipper Younus Khan batted with purpose to make 48 in 31 balls. Stuart Broad the villan in the previous game took 3 wickets.
Pakistan gave one of the most shameful fielding displays in this game. They seemed to be ignorant of fundamental in fielding and that is that catches win matches. They dropped nearly five catches and their ground fielding too was atrocious.
England battled their way to a strong 185 for 5 in 20 and it was a score that they had to defend to stay afloat in the tournament.
The wicket was a good one for batting with the England batsmen determined to bat better than they did against the Dutchmen where after opening stand of over 100 by Ravi Bopara and Luke Wright, they squandered it all by losing their way in the middle England's team in the that game they lost felt the absence of Kevin Pietersen.
He was injured and quickly recovered to play in this game which was sink or swim game.
England also made the right decision in giving Dimitri Mascarhenas a game. His allround ability was what England needed. His dropping came as a surprise andr condemnation all round.
When England batted they lost the high scoring Ravi Bopra very early.
But Kevion Pietersen showed that he had lost form, as he began to cut loose and make thye bowlers suffer. He made a top score of 58 in 38 balls.
Others who supported him were Luke Wright with 34 and Ovis Shah with 33.
Umer Gul and Ajmal had 2 wickets each.
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