Batting Without Boundaries

As I thought, last night's truncated game at the Oval could have gone either way. Ultimately it was no surprise that it went to the side with the batting line-up which was more suited to the game they were playing, and more fool me for forgetting about the priceless presence of Ronnie and Shiv in the Windies middle-order when I was writing them off the other day.

England's bowlers did a good job of getting them out of jail more than once in the competition, but there's only so far you can go when you have nobody below number four capable of playing with the type of fluency and power which should be a pre-requisite in the second half of a T20 innings. That England went from the eleventh over to the twentieth without a single boundary yesterday says it all.

Not that their selection helped. Why select a capable hitter like Graham Napier for the squad and then leave him on the bench throughout, especially, as yesterday, when Mascarenhas (who had hardly set the world on fire with the bat at Lord's on Sunday) didn't play either?