The hosts qualify for the semi-finals along with West Indies, England are going home. We assumed that England would find the spinners tricky, but in the end it was a blistering over by Malinga, ripping out the top three, that sunk England. Malinga finished with five wickets, the only bright spot for England being an attractive, aggressive 67 from Samit Patel that has done his selection claims for the India Tests no harm. In truth, it never looked like being more than a consolation prize, and in my opinion England were never likely to chase 170 runs.
There will be some who wonder if England tinkered with their team too much, making three changes for today.
Overall, the bright spots of the tournament have been the excellence of Steve Finn with the new ball, and the return to bowling form of Stuart Broad. Graeme Swann has also been in the wickets. Luke Wright has shown that he can bat at this level, Eoin Morgan has had his moments. Overall, the team has lost early wickets too often. Among the weaknesses have been the inability of Craig Kieswetter to keep the scoreboard ticking, Jade Dernbach being out of sorts, and of course the enduring inability to play spin and a lack of experience in the batting.
England can have few complaints about exiting at this stage, there are certainly four teams better than them in this tournament. They fought hard, though, in every game and tried to come back from bad starts with the bat, but the nature of the format makes that very hard to do. A learning curve, then, but one cannot feel especially optimistic about their chances against spin in India. Still, that's for another day... in the meantime, congratulations to an excellent Sri Lanka side, and thanks for following this with us.
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