The long-running debate over England's best batting line-up in T20 International cricket will continue till October's World Cup but Sri Lanka's 3-0 drubbing is a reminder of the inequalities of the tournament.
The draw for the World Cup - initially scheduled for Australia last year, but has since moved to India and now the UAE and Oman - took place 18 months ago, and in the intervening period it has become clear that England Have done well: They have avoided West Indies and New Zealand, both of which would be much stronger than the ICC rankings, and see themselves as favorites against both South Africa and Afghanistan.
The result is that even if they suffer a heavy loss to India in the group stage, they will only have to beat those two teams, plus two qualifiers from the preliminary stage, and they will advance to the semi-finals, two wins away from themselves. Will be The long-standing ambition of becoming the first men's team to hold both the World Cups simultaneously.
This series proved that while decisions have to be made about the best combination and composition of the team, what is most important for England is that they have a deep, versatile batting line-up full of such players. One who can win alone. His game of the day. For Saturday's bet at the Ageas Bowl, they were without three of their first-choice top six - Jos Buttler (calf), Jason Roy (hamstring), Ben Stokes (returned from an arm injury) - while their first-choice number 3 and No. 4 opened the batting and their back-up finisher came straight, yet their victory was a procession.
England's collapse from 143 to 143 after 15 overs to a total of 180 for 6 seemed like a fleeting moment to pay the price after Danushka Gunathilaka punched Chase's first ball through cover may fall; As it turned out, it would have to take a declaration with five overs remaining to turn it into a competitive game, as Sri Lanka's batsmen fell into a pile. It was the kind of clinical performance that helped them annihilate the weakest teams in their World Cup group; Unless they come non-stop in two of the other three matches, they will advance to the semi-finals.
Only then will his answers to important questions come under real scrutiny. Where should Jonny Bairstow bat? How can they get more from Stokes? Should Mark Wood be bowling primarily in the powerplay, at the death, or some of both? And the randomness of some events – notably the importance of the toss in a flood game in the UAE, keeping the dew in mind – could render such discussions useless anyway.
And so to David Malan. The website is filled with countless columns inches from the debate on Malan's importance in England's favor: no one has started his T20I career with such lucrative numbers and established himself as No. 1 in the ICC player rankings. But with such a strong set of batting options available to him, his slow-start manner and his occasional struggles on slower pitches, such as were expected in the UAE in October, intense—and perhaps unfair—under investigation. have come in.
The series has complicated the debate: his two low scores on the two-paced Cardiff pitches were completely unrelated, but his leading innings of 76 off 48 balls on a better pitch at the Ageas Bowl was one of the high scores: In the other 72 balls. The innings scored only 92 runs with the bat. Even if his form is "only one way out", as Eoin Morgan put it at the toss, his success rate in T20I cricket has been phenomenal.
On Saturday, Malan achieved no other England batsman in this series after Sri Lanka's blond-haired, bright-booted legspinner Wanindu Hasaranga. Realizing that the ball rolling in his arc towards the short boundary represented a favorable match-up for him, Malan treated Hasaranga with disdain, hitting him for two fours and three sixes and facing his side. scored 34 runs in 10 balls; Roy was the only man to give him four runs in the entire series.
The slog-step sixes were brutal, but there was also a touch of class: at 18 off 15, he reverse-swapped him into the gap between short third and backward point, hammering him to deep backward square leg in the same over . and bounced him in and out through gaps in the covers created by his reverse-sweep.
"When you do your match-up and look at the dimensions of the field, [at the other end] with the right hand, my match-up is to move the legspinner towards that short boundary," Malan later explained. "Even though it was up in the air, that was my role: to make a positive choice against him.
"If he had been an offspinner on that side, Johnny would probably have been over-aggressive against him because that was his match-up. I faced him in Cardiff the other night and didn't see him well, and my actions were. That's a lot. Wasn't good, so after a few days it was good to face him in different situations and climb over him."
During his difficult series in India, it seemed that Malan's method had more drawbacks than advantages, but it turned out to be the opposite in this innings. Maybe he doesn't mind the debate: "I love proving a point, so when I get criticized I like to be there to show people who have their opinion," he said. .
There are similar questions in the bowling attack: Are Chris Woakes and David Willey viable options as new ball specialists? Is Chris Jordan still a banker on death? The absence of much new information from this series means they won't be definitively answered until the knockout stage of the T20 World Cup - and yet, only 12 months later, there is one more to follow.