England and Australia woke up on Friday morning knowing that if they took to the field, one of them would almost certainly see their T20 World Cup hopes evaporate before the day was out, but in the end it was the evaporation of water which became the key issue. . The match, scheduled to kick off at 7pm, was eventually called off just under two hours later, allowing both sides to continue dreaming of the semi-finals for at least a few more days.
After the better part of four days of constant rain, it always looked like an occasion where the teams would be less likely to have to deal with turnovers than galoshes. But when the covers were removed from the pitch around 7pm and the groundsmen embarked on a frantic half-hour of soaking and cleaning, there was the prospect of cricket, rather than incessant drizzle, on the air Two field inspections have come and gone before, just minutes before a third was scheduled and with the ground still dangerously soft, the rain has returned and all hope is gone.
Despite their home runs, both teams said they would have preferred to play even an abbreviated five game than none at all. “You want to play full games of cricket, but that’s part of what makes our game unique, what makes it great,” Jos Buttler said. “Australia against England at the MCG in a must-win World Cup game is as big as it gets in your career and no matter what the result is, it’s something you want to experience. You don’t know how often these kinds of opportunities are going to come around.”
So Group 1 remains wide open, with the game between Ireland and Afghanistan abandoned in the afternoon and all the teams involved awarded a point. With seven of the 15 group games played – or abandoned – the six teams are separated by a single point, with England second, behind New Zealand in net rate and just ahead of Ireland, Australia, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, who play against the kiwis. Saturday in Sydney, fortunately no rain forecast.
After this match, attention will shift to quiet Brisbane ahead of the crucial 48 hours. Ireland are scheduled to play Australia on Monday, while Afghanistan play Sri Lanka on Tuesday and England face New Zealand. All sides know that wins in all of their remaining matches will likely see them through, although net run rate could be crucial. England have the slight advantage of going into their final group game, against Sri Lanka, at which point they will know exactly what they need to do to progress, if they still have any chance, having been on the brink of elimination since of Wednesday’s clash. defeat in Ireland
“We are still in the competition and we know, to some extent, that we have our destiny in our own hands,” Buttler said. “There is still a lot of confidence in the group. We have great players who are determined to right some wrongs from the other night. That’s what World Cup cricket and qualifier cricket is all about – these big games and being able to perform in them.”
The abandonments mean that of the five matches so far scheduled to be played in Melbourne, only one has gone ahead as planned, with another match – between Ireland and England – going ahead despite being shortened by rain. Two more matches are scheduled for the city: the final Group 2 match between India and Zimbabwe on November 6, and the final a week later.
“The weather has been so bad, since it started raining in the England game, it hasn’t stopped,” Ireland’s Andrew Balbirnie said after his game was called off. “It’s very wet out there. You come to Australia thinking you won’t need a hoodie or a rain jacket, but it’s certainly been different since we arrived three or four weeks ago.”
Captains Aaron Finch and Jos Buttler study the lack of action in Melbourne. Photograph: Daniel Pockett/ICC/Getty Images
Although October is normally Melbourne’s wettest month, this spring the city, and much of Australia’s east coast, has been treated to a strange confluence of weather phenomena: the Indian Ocean Dipole , the southern annular mode and La Niña, when strong trade winds blow westward across the Pacific Ocean.
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“We’ve been in quite a wet period for a while now in Victoria and right across eastern Australia – there’s been flooding from Queensland to Tasmania,” Christie Johnson, senior meteorologist at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, said. in the Guardian “It’s quite common in the spring for a lot of weather systems to come through Victoria, but this year is unusual by historical standards. All three climate engines together are combining to give us the perfect storm.”
Meteorologists have predicted an unusually wet spring for several months. But the nature of the rain that has dogged the tournament has also been unusual, with Melbourne being drenched in rain for most of the past four days. “We tend to have more early showers, potentially a little more thunderstorms, rather than steady rain,” Johnson said. “This is more of a feature of the tropical moisture being dragged into Victoria. It’s something you’d see more commonly in Queensland where there’s moisture in the air. We tend to have drier weather, and it’s unusual for tropical moisture to arrive so south.”
There is some frustration that about three kilometers from the MCG is a 53,000-capacity venue that regularly hosts cricket and has a retractable roof, but the Marvel Stadium has been left empty as the rain falls. “You can’t predict the weather,” Australia coach Andrew McDonald said, “but what you do know is that when it’s England against Australia there’s no better place to play than the MCG.”