New Zealand are unsure of a semi-final spot after their four-wicket defeat by England and captain Mitchell Santner admitted his side missed an opportunity to seal qualification on Friday. England had already secured a place in the last four, but their victory kept Pakistan’s national cricket team alive in the tournament. Pakistan now require a massive win over Sri Lanka in their final Super Eights match to leapfrog New Zealand on a clean sweep.“It was a good game. Obviously it would have made our lives easier if we had won. But again, we played a pretty good game. Obviously there are moments, both with the bat and with the ball, that you can probably look back on and turn the game around a little bit,” Santner said at the post-match presentation.
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While Santner acknowledged England’s fearless approach, he felt his side fell short of the ideal numbers.“But again, credit to England and the way they played. We created a good platform to target in the last couple of overs and lost a couple of them there. We just kind of scraped to 160. It could easily have been 170, 175. But at the end of course you need 40 from the last three.”“And yeah, the way they bounced back and obviously at the end was good. Obviously we lost wickets in the next innings and then we weren’t able to get a score through, I guess, the last four overs. But we kind of built a platform tonight, not in a pretty good place for the second time.”“And then maybe we took a few tough options straight out of time-out. But again, you need a bit of running and we thought at that stage 170, 175 would be a really good score,” he said.Currently, Pakistan’s qualification equation is steep. If they bat first, they must win by at least 65 runs. If they chase, they need to work the target in 13.1 overs to beat New Zealand’s net run rate.England captain Harry Brook reserved special praise for batsman Rehan Ahmed, who took 2/28 before smashing an unbeaten 19 off seven balls to steer England home alongside Will Jacks (32* off 18).“We’ve seen what Reh (Ahmed) can do in the nets and he went out and played beautifully, he took it from them. Along with Jacksy (Jacks), his fourth MOM, quite happy with that performance. We said at the start we’d pick based on the conditions and we thought today was the perfect opportunity to bring him (Ahmed) in and he’s done an amazing job.”“New Zealand are a very strong side, we played them before Christmas, they do everything so well, run between the wickets and then some extreme power.Veteran wicketkeeper-batsman Jos Buttler is yet to register a notable score in the tournament and fell for yet another duck, but Brook backed his team-mate firmly.“There’s been a lot of talk that (Buttler) has played 150 games for England and people have to take a step back from that. He’s in a rut now but it’s an exciting thing to know what he can produce in the next few games.”“He is a phenomenal player and I have no doubts about him.
