Sunday, August 31, 2008

England ODI Victory, 4-0!

Today saw England face South Africa at Lord's in the fourth ODI. It is pretty much a dead series in that England have won and South Africa seem to appear to have given up. The match was greatly interrupted by rain and sadly i could only see a few overs of it as i was playing today myself (scoring a half century so perhaps not so bad!)

The start having been delayed to rain and then rain throughout the South Africa Innings, batting first, meant they could only bat 32.1 overs making 183 for the loss of 6 wickets with a great innings of 74 by Gibbs (so i am told, having not seen it myself). Further rain and Duckworth Lewis intervetion gave England the target of 137 from 20 overs; to them that probably didn't sound too hard, especially with recent form of both them and South Africa (or lack of in their case). For the loss of only 3 wickets they ended up doing it relatively easily, even if it did come down to the last few overs - Shah batted well for his 44*, as did Flintoff for his 31*; these two finishing off the fourth ODI giving England victory.

The rain is always a pain in the backside with cricket and this summer has seen some terrible weather in England. As mentioned previously Pro40 has been greatly affected, but this was clearly a match where rain will have dampened the victory for England, but all the same a victory is a victory.

Taking the series to 4-0 in to the last game at Cardiff means that England have only one match to win to give them the ICC rank of second best in the world; whether that truly respresents the team is questionable as this is a new era and just the start of it, perhaps even just the honeymoon period of it? Who knows - we can only hope and be the loyal England fans we are, over the last decade the team has gone through a lot, great highs and GREAT lows. Personally i say bring on the next test series and lets see how we do there, real cricket for a real challenge - good luck to them, just the small issue of all that bloody money over in the West Indies to deal with too; silly stuff really.

Fingers crossed for a Cardiff victory!

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