Saturday, September 26, 2009

Clinical finish for England


England registered an easy victory against Sri Lanka in the Group A Match here in Johannesburg. With this defeat, Sri Lanka now has 1 win and 1 defeat from 2 matches. The other two teams in the Group are New Zealand and South Africa.

England won the toss and elected to bowl first. Sri Lanka suffered early blows inflicted by English pace battery – Graham Onions, James Anderson and Stuart Broad. They shared 8 wickets between them. Sri Lanka was in deep trouble as they lost their first 4 wickets for just 17. Then Thilana Samarweera and Thilana Kandamby shared a useful partnership for the 5th wicket. Samarweera scored 30. Kandamby, along with Angelo Matthews took the score to 163. Then Anderson and Luke Wright finished the things and limited Sri Lanka to 217 runs. Kandamby scored a useful half century, as he finished on 53. Also, Matthews scored 52.

In reply, England started off badly losing opener Denly and skipper Andrew Strauss early. Both were dismissed by Kulasekara for 5 and 9 respectively. Former skipper, Paul Collingwood played a handy knock of 46 off 51 balls to ease the things a bit. Owais Shah played a solid knock of 44 runs off 74 balls. After Collingwood’s departure, Shah continued the innings with Eoin Morgan who was equally impressive with the bat. The M-M-M magic was not at it’s very best as Muralitharan and Malinga were able to take only 1 wicket each. Kulasekara took 2 wickets. Morgan remained unbeaten on 63, along with wicketkeeper batsman Matt Prior who remained not out on 28.

Paul Collingwood was declared the Man of the Match.

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