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 ultimately emphatic, it was not exactly a rediscovery of peak form, even if Tom Banton located his with the 41-ball 63 that powered his team to victory.
“We haven’t made it as easy as we would have liked so far but hopefully we can have a slightly easier run starting with Italy on Monday,” the captain Harry Brook said. “We haven’t played our best cricket yet but we’re in a strong position. World Cups aren’t always smooth sailing. We’d rather not start amazing and finish amazing than start amazing and finish bad.”
Scotland built half an excellent innings at the beginning of the match, but it careered downhill at Winter Olympic pace in its third quarter and, for all that they continued to show flashes of quality, they were unable to recover. “The dressing room is hurting a little bit,” said their captain, Richie Berrington, who top-scored for his side with 49 off 32.
“We had a lot of belief going into that game. If we played our best cricket, executed our skills, we were right in there with a chance. We showed that for a large part of the game. It has reinforced the message that when we execute our skills for long enough we can put any team under pressure and mix with the best.”
Scotland 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 were unable to produce a total to truly stretch England on a good batting wicket, even if Brook’s team did occasionally threaten to self-destruct.
England’s opening partnership is in theory a strength but against both Nepal and Scotland Phil Salt and Jos Buttler have faltered. “There’s a long way to go in this tournament,” Brook said, “and if they get firing at the right time then we’ll be in a really good place.”
They put the team in an awkward one here, Salt driving straight to point having scored only two, and Buttler going only one better – even if he became just the fourth player to score 4,000 runs in T20 internationals in the process – before he sent a leading edge looping into the hands of mid-off.
Banton and Jacob Bethell eventually added 66 from 45 for the third wicket but they 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, and from there it quickly became less a chase than a stroll.
Scotland’s innings had been derailed when Jofra Archer took two wickets in its third over, but Berrington rebuilt alongside Michael Jones (33 off 20), before a partnership of 71 off 42 with Tom Bruce saw the team stride towards a genuinely competitive score. But having romped to 48 runs in the first four overs of spin they faced, everything changed when Adil Rashid and Liam Dawson returned.
The transformation was not quite immediate, and Berrington hit the second ball of Dawson’s comeback high over the head of long-off for six. But then, from nowhere, there was chaos. In the space of 22 balls of unbroken spin, and, despite the fact that few deliveries actually did much spinning, Scotland lost five wickets for just 15 runs. And that, there, was the match.
England now know that victory over Italy on Monday will secure a place in the Super Eights; Scotland are not out yet, but may be by the time they face Nepal in their final group fixture on Tuesday. “We’ll just have to wait and see what happens,” said Berrington. “We can’t look too far ahead but our focus is going to be on how we move on from this game. There’s a lot of positives to take from the cricket we’ve played in the last three games.”