Kamal Ghorui
New Zealand remain unsure of a semi-final berth after their four-wicket defeat to England, and skipper Mitchell Santner admitted his side missed an opportunity to seal qualification on Friday. England had already booked their place in the last four, but their victory has kept Pakistan national cricket team alive in the tournament. Pakistan now require a massive win over Sri Lanka in their final Super Eights fixture to leapfrog New Zealand on net run rate.“That was a good match. Obviously, it would have made our lives easy if we won. But again, we played a pretty good game. There’s obviously moments, both with the bat and the ball, that you can probably look back on and kind of turn the game a little bit,” Santner said at the post-match presentation.
While acknowledging England’s fearless approach, Santner felt his side fell short of an ideal total.“But again, credit to England and the way they played. We set up a good platform to target the last few overs and lost a few there. We only kind of scraped to 160. It could have easily been 170, 175. But then obviously at the end, you need 40 off the last three.“And yeah, the way they were able to take down the offing and obviously at the end was good. Obviously, the other innings we kind of lost wickets throughout and then, weren’t able to get to a score through, I guess, the last four overs. But, tonight we kind of set a platform, not to the second time out in a pretty good spot.“And then, maybe took some tough options straight off the time out. But again, you need to kind of get runs and we were thinking at that stage 170, 175 would have been a really good score,” he said.As things stand, Pakistan’s qualification equation is steep. If they bat first, they must win by at least 65 runs. If chasing, they need to overhaul the target within 13.1 overs to surpass New Zealand’s net run rate.England skipper Harry Brook reserved special praise for leg-spinner Rehan Ahmed, who claimed 2/28 and then smashed an unbeaten 19 off seven balls to guide England home alongside Will Jacks (32* off 18).“We’ve seen what Reh (Ahmed) can do in the nets and he’s gone out and played beautifully, taken it away from them. Along with Jacksy (Jacks), his fourth MOM, pretty happy with that performance. We said at the start, we’re going to select on conditions and we thought today was the perfect opportunity to bring him (Ahmed) in and he did an amazing job.“New Zealand are a wery strong side, we played against them before Christmas, they do everything so well, running between wickets and then some extreme power.”Veteran wicketkeeper-batter Jos Buttler is yet to register a significant score in the tournament and fell for another duck, but Brook firmly backed his teammate.“Been a lot said, he’s (Buttler) played 150 games for England and people need to take a step back from that. He’s in a rut now but that’s an exciting thing, to know what he could produce in the next couple of games.“He’s a phenomenal player and I’ve got no doubts about him.”
