Moeen Ali (Source – Twitter)
The T20 cricket extravaganza has been thoroughly entertaining the crowd with some nail-biting encounters in the ongoing T20 World Cup 2024. The caravan of the World Cup fever continued with England (ENG) taking on South Africa (SA) in the Group 2 fixture (Match 45) of the Super Eights round on Friday, June 22. Notably, both the teams were coming off wins into the game thereby making it a heavyweight tussle when they took the field in Gros Islet.
After winning the toss, England opted to bowl first in a bid to assess the conditions for a calculated run chase. However, the decision of skipper Jos Buttler seemingly backfired after Quinton de Kock went all guns blazing against one of the best bowling units in the mega cricket event. Along with Reeza Hendricks, the South African wicketkeeper smacked the likes of Jofra Archer en route to an 86-run stand for the opening wicket.
But it was Mooen Ali and Adil Rashid who got the English side back into the game with some frugal bowling spells. As a result, it helped Archer to get back into his mojo and dismissed David Miller to restrict South Africa from posting a mammoth total as they only managed to score 163/6.
In reply, in what initially seemed a very gettable target for a strong English batting unit, pacer Kagiso Rabada got the opening for South Africa as the hero of the last match Phil Salt got out cheaply. The momentum carried forward with Keshav Maharaj picking wickets of Jos Buttler and Jonny Bairstow to derail English from getting a flying start. As a result, despite Harry Brook’s resistance, The South African side successfully defended the target to beat England by seven runs. With this, now comes the bigger question which arrived was what will England now need to do to get a berth in the Semifinals of the T20 World Cup 2024?
What does England need to do to qualify for the T20 World Cup 2024 semi-final round?
Well for the defending champions, who crawled through to the Super Eights after getting some favours from other teams who helped England to get through to the next stage of the ongoing T20 World Cup 2024, managed to win their first two games in a dominating fashion.
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Hence, England have a good Net Run Rate of 0.412 (NRR) with two points to their name, with a game against United States of America (USA) left to play. Should they defeat them ahead, their chances are close to 90 per cent to make it to the knockout stage despite having ended up on the losing side against South Africa.