9 hours ago
6
In the city where a few handfuls of rupees were melted down to make the original Calcutta Cup, it was Scotland who lost their shape when the heat started to rise and the pressure to build. England won by five wickets and though it was, in the end, emphatic it was not exactly a rediscovery of peak form, even if Tom Banton appeared to have located his with a 41-ball 63 that powered his team to victory.
Scotland built half an excellent innings, but it careered downhill at Winterolympian pace in its third quarter. They faced two helpings of spin, each four overs long, and each brought carnage of a different kind: a barrage of runs in the first, a riot of wickets in the second. From there they recovered somewhat, but on a fine batting wicket England never seriously flirted with defeat, even if they did briefly threaten to self-destruct.
Phil Salt besmirched his excellent record on this ground by driving straight to point having scored only two, and Jos Buttler went only one better – becoming along the way just the fourth player to score 4,000 runs in T20 internationals – before he sent a leading edge looping into the hands of mid-off. Banton and Jacob Bethell were initially determined to bring little more than calm, and this became the first time in 16 years that England failed to score a boundary in their first four overs of a T20 innings.
But Scotland’s score was sufficiently small that one big over would send the required run rate plummeting and it came in the ninth, Mark Watt’s first, in which Banton deposited each of the first three legal deliveries into the stands. From there it became less a chase than a stroll, which was just as well as Bethell and Harry Brook fell guilelessly into Scottish traps before being caught at short fine leg.
For all his many qualities Brook seems completely unable to contain his love of the scoop, conceived as a low-risk means of forcing your opponents into an inconvenient fielding change but the odds are far less in the batter’s favour when the fielder is already there. Banton completed the job in the company of Sam Curran and then Will Jacks, who ended the match with two boundaries off Brad Wheal.
Scotland’s innings had been briefly derailed when Jofra Archer took two wickets in its third over, but the captain, Richie Berrington, set about rebuilding alongside the opener Michael Jones (33 off 20), before a partnership of 71 off 42 with Tom Bruce threatened to haul the team to a genuinely competitive score.
Having been bewitched by West Indies spin in the middle overs in Mumbai on Wednesday, England tried the same trick here, but their attempt to cast a similar spell over Bruce and Berrington appeared cursed as the Scottish pair scored a combined 17 off the two spinners’ first overs followed by 31 off the next two, at which point the plan was temporarily abandoned.
But England had only 12 seam overs in their team, some of which they needed to save until the end of Scotland’s innings, and it was only a matter of time – and not much of it either – before the spinners would have to return. Initially it seemed not much had changed while Curran and Jamie Overton bowled an over each, as the second ball of Liam Dawson’s return was hammered high over the head of long-off for six. But then, from nowhere, carnage.
Over the next 22 balls of unbroken spin from Adil Rashid and Dawson, and despite the fact that few deliveries actually did any spinning, Scotland lost five wickets for just 15 runs. And that, there, was the match.
