Remember this past summer when Australia comprehensively destroyed the English cricket team across the entire season? Remember that? 5-0 in the Ashes series? If you thought the English would go home and re-assess their strategies and ensure that they don’t sink any lower in the year, you’d be dead wrong. Overnight, during the final pool games of the T20 International World Cup, England weren’t just beaten, they were comprehensively flogged, by minnow nation the Netherlands. So not only have you learned that there are no depths to which the English cricketing squad can’t sink, but you also learned that they actually play cricket in the Netherlands.
Maybe it was the similar coloured shirts that got the English team slightly confused. Maybe some of them got on the gas with the boys the night before. Maybe they’re staging one hell of an elaborate April Fools prank on the cricket loving public. Whatever it was, it was humiliating. Not only did they fall short of the Netherlands total of 133, they were completely bowled out for just 88. That’s a winning margin of 45 runs.
And this isn’t even the first time it’s happened. In the 2009 World T20 tournament, the same thing happened against the same team. Come on! That’s an unbeaten record for the Netherlands against in England in this form of the game, and makes them the only Associate Nation to have beaten a Test nation twice in T20I play.
Of course, Australia is already eliminated from this current tournament, but that’s clearly neither here nor there. The main point is that this latest English defeat is not unlike a cool pint of British beer: bitter and satisfying.
Photo: Prakash Singh via Getty Images.
