ICC Cricket World Cup 2019

26 Mins but worth a watch when you have some time

Interesting comment from Steve James writing in the Times today:

"These two warm-up matches were not of England's choosing given that they did their warming up in comfortably beating Pakistan 4-0..."

This seems to imply that England were somehow made to play these games against their will, or contractually obliged to play 2 warm-ups.

Is this the ICC wringing every penny they can out of the preliminaries? I noticed that all the games were being filmed, even though only one per day was scheduled on Sky. If the scheduled game had a rain break, they just switched to the other game.

(28-05-2019 23:46 )Hawaiian Brian Wrote:  This seems to imply that England were somehow made to play these games against their will, or contractually obliged to play 2 warm-ups.

Every competing country is required to play 2 warm up matches.

I would say England's first objective would be to qualify for the semi finals and avoid Australia

The competition starts today, when England host South Africa from the Oval.

England: Jason Roy, Jonny Bairstow, Joe Root, Eoin Morgan, Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes, Moeen Ali, Chris Woakes, Adil Rashid, Jofra Archer, Liam Plunkett.

South Africa won the toss and asked England to bat first (unsurprising considering the 10:30 start).

England 311/8 innings closed. Is that a good score?

Stokes found it hard to score mainly because the bowling was pretty tight at the end.

A good bowling attack had South Africa was all out for 207.

Solid start, on to the next one.