Cricket-Match-Special ... A forum for discussion

I'm pleased that England have stopped that, throwing the ball to Livingstone even though they already have 6 bowlers in the side, nonsense

Going to be a 220 chase, I reckon. Roy can't afford to fiddle about tonight

England bowl well enough at the death to keep the target under 210

Roy still can't afford to fiddle on

Topley best of the bowlers again.

Mr Roy chewing up a few balls here.

won't do

is he still mis-timing everything?

yep

it's one thing to fiddle on and then accelerate, but faffing about for ages and then holing out is just not good enough. I'd rather he got out in the first couple of overs going large than just taking overs out of the game

Too much to do even for LL and JB1.

Roy uses up nearly a fifth of the overs at 5 runs an over when the asking rate was over 10 from ball one. Bairstow comes in in the 9th over with the asking rate already nearly 15 an over and then they hold Livingstone back and he comes in after Curran

there's some muddled thinking going on here.

SA hit 9 sixes I think. There were 3 for Buttler early on, but I don't think England hit any more after that

poor performance tonight by the looks of things. This is exactly the way Durham play T20 and they're clueless

Too many to chase. Bowlers need to do a bit better. But the toss is an advantage.

Except England won the toss!

they prefer to chase

but a quick look at the white ball results this month reveal that only India have chased successfully. They did it twice, but one of those was the ODI when England fell in a heap batting first. Apart from those two India wins, every other match has been won by the team batting first. There might be a reason for that, but I'm probably too dim to understand it

England chose to chase again, clearly ignoring the evidence of the summer. Ah well.... they must be confident

chasing 192

no problem, presumably, even with Jason Roy mis-timing everything and reducing the number of overs England have available to chase with to 16