Will England Channelise Their Inner Ashes Giant Against Australia?
Jos Buttler hitting in the nets ahead of ENG vs AUS (AP Photo)
England find themselves at the bottom of the table.
They actually enter this next big contest with no more than a forty two percent chance of a win.
It isn’t even an ordinary game; this is a biggie, as they call it. The game features old rivals, Australia.
There are teams. There are rivalries. And there are mega battles.
Quite frankly, they don’t only or always belong to an India and Pakistan, which anyways has been a rather one-sided one, especially in the most dominant format in 2023.
But here’s a thing that probably even Australia cannot or won’t deny.
Despite the waning fortunes of their oldest arch-rivals in the sport, it would be a fool’s errand to undermine England.
That’s despite seeing England with their backs against the wall.
There haven’t been too many tournaments where England have been smashed the way they have been in the ongoing Men’s ODI World Cup 2023.
The only contest that the Jos Buttler team won up until now is that odd game against Bangladesh, which was just the seventh game of the 48-game-long tournament.
To even think that the very team beaten by a far more inexperienced Afghanistan has actually won a World Cup game and that too, by a 137-run margin seems surreal.
Joe Root would agree. As would the trinity of Jonny Bairstow, Ben Stokes and Dawid Malan, each of whom needs runs.
Isn’t it?
How might then the Pat Cummins-led side treat the team that’s been considered and perhaps rightly so, the biggest loser of the World Cup?
How far easy or just would it be to take the desperately out-of-form Buttler, yet to make a fifty, and lightly?
Will David Willey’s recent announcement regarding retirement will make him or his bowling colleagues complacent?
Will the 33-year-old left-arm medium pacer not take each game from now on as practically his last ever, even as there’s a game left following the upcoming Australia contest?
Can the bowling trio of Zampa, Cummins and Starc weather the storm that is the big quintuplet of English batting, which includes- Malan, Stokes, Bairstow, Root and Buttler?
Countless questions spring to the mind in the context of a game that the intrepid fan will hope will be anything but a dull, boring, one-sided affair.
An affair in which any team could play the romantic with the bat or ball.
However, England will actually have their task cut out.
And it’s that, they simply cannot afford to leave India, with yet more grief and pain than they already have at the moment having hardly been their usual aggressive and winning selves.
It’s almost as if the concept of “Bazball” has become Baz-trolled. How else would one describe it?
But it’s one thing to lose a cricketing contest, but something quite other to be smothered by an opponent. The latter is what’s happened to the inventors of the very game in their duos against India and New Zealand, in particular.
While they were quite simply humiliated by the Blackcaps in one of the biggest tournament openers there’s been in an ICC World Cup, India led by a Mohd Shami in menacing form the other day, tore into Buttler’s men.
But having said that and with the awareness that England could even further embarrass themselves, in a few hours from now, we could even get to see the great Smith having to battle it ought against Ali or maybe even captains clashing against one another: Jos Buttler vs the Aussie attack led by none other than Pat Cummins.
And yet at the same time, not only will we hope to see, in the next few hours from now, a run-feast and if not, then hopefully a mild mannered run chase that only gets much tenser as the game draws to a close.
Here’s a fact. Whether you’re going to be watching a true 2023 World Cup biggie event from some handheld device or on TV in the company of friends, remember, there are more odds on either sides than they’d care to remember.
Jos Buttler will at no cost accept a defeat against the Aussies; him pertaining to a culture that once had stars like Bell, Strauss, Pietersen, and Trott, who cold tank any attack.
He would also care to remember that should several of his team’s ageing dashers are going to exit cricket’s greatest stage with some pomp, then the quintuplet of Bairstow, Stokes, Malan, Root and Buttler himself will have to deliver. As will Liam Livingstone, who as on date, hasn’t hit a hundred from 21 one day innings in an England shirt.
Then there’s Adam Zampa. Then there’s Adil Rashid.
How on earth, don’t think this is a fanboy question, is this game not like any other biggie event in the realm of cricket?
What happens in the course of the next 24 hours will affect both teams differently; an Australian win will sprint them further. Their chances of making it to the semis will, at the back of this victory, be nearly certain.
Meanwhile, Jos, the boss, as the dreary nickname coined by some cricketing Fantatics dictates, he’ll want anything but another defeat now in the ICC men’s 50 over cricket World Cup.
The battle lines have been drawn. Let cricket begin in this mega Aus v ENG biggie.
 "Dev Tyagi")
