Australia seamer hints that his team would rather see Scotland through at defending champions’ expense
While the exact sums won’t be known until England have played Oman and Namibia – a defeat against either will end their tournament – there is a good chance that a scenario emerges whereby Australia could win their final group match by a narrow-enough margin to ensure Scotland went through at England’s expense.
“In this tournament you potentially come up against England at some stage again and…they’re probably one of the top few teams on their day and we’ve had some real struggles against them in T20 cricket, so if we can get them out of the tournament that’s in our best interest as well as probably everyone else,” Hazlewood said. “It’ll be interesting to see. We’ve never really been in this position before as a team, I don’t think, so whether we have discussions or not, we’ll just try and play it again the way we did tonight. That’ll be up to people, not me.”
Such a scenario would revive memories of when Australia attempted to game the system at the 1999 ODI World Cup against West Indies with a go-slow batting performance to ensure they could take extra points into the Super Sixes.
“Whether you get close and you just knock it around and drag it out,” Hazlewood suggested of how it could play out. “There’s a few options there but…to take confidence from winning and winning well, I think that’s almost more important than potentially trying to knock someone else out. They’ve still got a lot to do on their behalf as well, so I think it’ll become clearer the closer we get to that sort of stuff.”
With run-rates not carrying forward to the Super Eights in this tournament, there would be no damage to Australia’s hopes should they take their foot off the gas. On that factor, Hazlewood conceded he thought it was odd that no benefits were taken from the group stage performances.
“It’s a little bit strange that it doesn’t go through the tournament,” he said. “This is probably the first T20 World Cup I’ve played that’s set up this way, or first World Cup in general that’s set up this way, so it’s a little bit different. I think the work that you do in the round games and if you go through undefeated and have a good net run-rate, doesn’t really account for much once you’re in the Super Eights. So, yeah, it’s a strange one but that’s how it is.”
For their part, Namibia could render all calculations unnecessary if they are able to pull off an upset in their final game against England although captain Gerhard Erasmus was remaining diplomatic in the midst of the Australia-England rivalry.
“Obviously, also in the Australian press that will be pretty liked,” he said. “But for us, we’re pretty neutral so I can’t really comment on any of that. We’re here to continue playing at our best abilities. Unfortunately, as the captain I sort of have to say that we haven’t quite reached our full potential in this tournament. I guess you’re all Aussies here, so you’re really cheering us on to maybe try and get that win, but I’d have to rein it back a little bit and say that we probably need to play our best cricket and nothing more than that.”
Andrew McGlashan is a deputy editor at ESPNcricinfo
