Philip Brown/Reuters
Nuwan Kulasekara after dismissing Australia's Shane Watson (not pictured) during a Champions Trophy match in London Monday.
LONDON — Britain’s notoriously fickle weather looms over the playoff stages of the Champions Trophy and threatens an anticlimactic conclusion.
Three of the four matches in the final round of the pool stages, which finished Monday, were shortened by rain. And the forecast calls for rain Thursday in Cardiff, Wales, when India plays Sri Lanka in the second semifinal at Sophia Gardens, and Sunday in Birmingham, when the final is scheduled at Edgbaston Stadium. The forecast was a little better for the first semifinal in London on Wednesday, when England plays South Africa at the Oval, but there was still a chance of thunderstorms.
The fear is that a tournament featuring the world’s great players will end instead with most people talking about Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis, the two English statisticians who devised a fair method for deciding rain-affected matches.
In the event of complete rainouts, the semifinals will be awarded to the teams that won the preliminary pools, England and India. If the final is rained out, the trophy would be shared as it was in 2002, when India and Sri Lanka were thwarted by South Asian monsoons.
Sri Lanka clinched the final semifinal spot Monday, and in the process ended Australia’s hopes of a Champions Trophy hat trick.
Sri Lanka did it the tough way, qualifying by winning twice after losing its opening pool match against New Zealand. And it had to battle hard before beating the Australians by 20 runs.
The best moment of a miserable tournament for Australia was its last. Its final pair, Clint McKay and Xavier Doherty, came up needing 62 runs for a victory and got more than two-thirds of the way there before McKay was caught and bowled by Sri Lanka’s Tillakaratne Dilshan.
Australia, which needed to overtake Sri Lanka’s total of 253 in 29.1 of its 50 allotted six ball overs to advance, had been eliminated by then. But McKay and Doherty were playing for pride, and for Australia’s neighbor, New Zealand, which would have squeezed into the last four if Sri Lanka had lost.
“It was great to see them battle it out, and it would have been nice to get a win,” said Australia’s affable captain, George Bailey, who admitted that “once those 29 overs had ticked over, we were resigned to the fact that it was over.”
But there was nothing resigned about the way that McKay and Doherty, both specialist bowlers, battled. McKay’s anguish was evident when his effort was ended by Dilshan’s acrobatic catch, which set Sri Lanka’s players cavorting across the Oval’s playing surface.
Sri Lanka has played in four of cricket’s last seven global finals and lost them all. “I will be desperate to win, but it is not just about big trophies,” said batsman Mahela Jayawardene, a veteran of all four of those finals. “We have to be desperate to win, whether it is a group match, a semifinal or a final.”
Sri Lanka’s opponent, India, is the only team to advance with a perfect record. It was hardly under pressure, much less in danger of defeat, in any of its pool matches.
“India are playing really good cricket,” said Jayawardene, who downplayed any significance to Sri Lanka’s victory in a warmup match against India before the tournament. “Its batting looks extremely strong, and we need to focus on that.”
If any team is happier than Sri Lanka to have made the final four, it is South Africa. It has made a speciality of finding cruel ways of getting eliminated from global tournaments, usually in rain-affected matches. The way it was eliminated from the 1992 World Cup, after a brief rain delay turned a feasible target into an impossible one, was one of the injustices that led to the adoption of the Duckworth-Lewis system.
In 2003, as host, it went out of the World Cup because its players had misread the Duckworth-Lewis calculations issued to them.
But this time, South Africa was the beneficiary. Had rain started to fall one ball earlier in Cardiff on Friday night, West Indies would have beaten South Africa under the Duckworth-Lewis formula and progressed instead. That one ball resulted in the West Indian batsman Kieron Pollard being dismissed. It shifted the Duckworth-Lewis calculation so that the match was tied, and South Africa advanced.
“I feel bad for West Indies; this is part of the game,” said South Africa captain AB de Villiers, who said his team “needed to be calm, and we were.”
Hosts generally do not win cricket’s global titles; India’s World Cup victory in 2011 was the exception.
Despite inventing modern limited-overs one-day cricket in 1963, England has yet to win a championship in the format. Fifty years into the format would seem a good time to break that pattern. But, weather permitting, it looks as if South Africa — which has the tournament’s biggest single weapon in paceman Dale Steyn — may be about to break its own tradition of failure in big tournaments and emerge as the champion.
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