“We know that we’re being hunted,” says Australia’s Beth Mooney. Yeah, in much the same way that Moby Dick was being hunted. The harpoon that can kill this white whale is yet to be forged.

After the 2023 T20 World Cup, the seas of cricket are again littered with the splintered remains of whaleboats.

“We’ve seen in this tournament there are teams around the world getting better and better as the years go on,” said Mooney. This was shortly after she’s made 74 not out off 53 balls to set South Africa about as big a target as they’ve ever successfully chased. Also – small point – but South Africa have never actually won a T20I against Australia.

“You guys are very annoying,” was South Africa captain Sune Luus’ take afterwards, which was a joke, but also kinda true.

“Just don’t turn up – it’s too hard, don’t bother,” advised Mooney, which was also a joke, amd also kinda true.

“We don’t get tired of it,” she added about winning world cups. This wasn’t a joke.

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A year ago, during the 50-over tournament, we headlined our semi-finals preview piece, Who will lose to Australia in the World Cup final? Even if it’s a different format, it’s tempting to take the same attitude now. But if there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that life isn’t an endless procession of victories. It’s more of a munge of making-the-best-of-its. Surely that fundamental truth will apply to Australia before too long?

T20 World Cup semi-finals time then. Where are we? Australia and England have won all four games so far. India have only lost to England. South Africa are also through having won two games bigly and lost two marginally.

Australia play India tomorrow. England play South Africa on Friday. (Both matches are at 1pm UK time.)

England v South Africa

If there’s cause for optimism for England, it’s that they currently boast the tournament’s top run-scorer (Nat Sciver-Brunt) and also the top wicket-taker (Sophie Ecclestone). If the latter only shares that position with Australia’s Megan Schutt and New Zealand’s Lea Tahuhu (great name) then it’s worth emphasising that her average (a comical 7.62) and economy rate (an absolutely outlandish 3.81) are superior.

This is of course just more of the same from Ecclestone, who is the top-ranked bowler in both limited overs formats and showing few signs of ever not being so. It has reached the point now where many teams are pretty much just writing off the four overs she bowls as losses and hoping they can do enough with the bat to win in the other 16. That is an incredible thing and honestly not really a very viable strategy.

Ecclestone really deserves a catchy nickname or tagline to acknowledge her consistent brilliance. ‘The Chester Jester’ references what a fun player she is, but doesn’t otherwise seem all that flattering. For now, we’re going with ‘The Cestrian Who’s the Bestrian’ because it’s exactly the mix of awkward and awful that always seems to appeal to us.

For their part, South Africa are at home, which is surely helpful. Less helpfully they’re still slightly haunted by the decision to leave out captain Dane van Niekerk because she couldn’t run 2km quickly enough.

Obviously the players will have been trying not to think about her omission during the tournament. Equally obviously, they’ll have been completely failing, because one of them – Marizanne Kapp – is van Niekerk’s wife.

Australia v India

India are in decent shape. Their only defeat was to England and it wasn’t a bad one. After initially reducing them to 29-3, they found themselves chasing 152 to win and successfully exceeded the required run-rate in the 16 non-Ecclestone overs.

It is also usually India who end Australia’s recurring winning streaks. They ended a 21-match unbeaten run in December, albeit only after a Super Over. They also ended a 26-match winning streak in one-day internationals that stretched from 2017 to 2021.

As causes for optimism go, the best you can say is that it is one.

The final’s on Sunday, by the way.

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South Africa wanted to win this one. England were happy to loosen a few limbs. That’s kind of how it went.

In many ways this South Africa v England series was the definitive pointless bilateral: a little island of three one-day internationals dropped right in the middle of another tournament with no other matches between the two sides before or after it.

But then it suddenly gained a sense of immediacy after South Africa forfeited a series against Australia last month so their best-known players could appear in the SA20 (except for captain Temba Bavuma, whose arguably immodest self-selected base price appeared to put off would-be bidders). (Update: He’s now got a gig, off the back of this series, replacing Tom Abell at Sunrisers Eastern Cape.)

Allowing points from that Australia series to drift away on the winds made it that much more difficult for South Africa to qualify for this year’s World Cup without first taking part in the 10-team qualifying tournament in Harare in June. Beating England means they’ve a good chance of sidestepping that.

The World Cup is also just about close enough that almost any ODI can seem meaningful at the minute.

Match 1

A 27-run victory was a great start for the home team, but headlines nevertheless focused on Jason Roy’s 79-ball hundred.

Roy was left out of England’s T20 World Cup squad after pretty much losing the ability to play cricket, but he’s been clinging on in the middle format because… um… not sure actually.

> Where are Jason Roy’s foundations? Do white ball specialists need more time in the middle?

Nevertheless, cling on he has and this hundred was a pretty impressive scrabble up from the deperately-clinging-on position he’s been in.

Kyle Reese from The Terminator adds…

“If nothing else, this innings showed that Roy can still do this. It’s one of those times when ‘inconsistency’ is actually step up.“

Match 2

342-7 is a good one-day score except when it isn’t. This match had the air of being one of those occasions when the team batting first (England) didn’t entirely appreciate how plentiful boundaries could be.

Temba Bavuma top-scored for South Africa with 109 off 102 balls, but all of the top seven chipped in and nobody scored at slower than a run a ball.

Kyle Reese from The Terminator adds…

“In the first game, Jofra Archer conceded 81 runs off 10 overs on his return to the side. Two other seamers made comebacks in this second game: Chris Woakes conceded 60 in 6.1 overs and Reece Topley conceded 74 in nine. England will hope this series served as an opportunity to get this sort of rustiness out of the way.”

Match 3

South Africa gave Anrich Nortje a break for this one and didn’t bring back Kagiso Rabada after resting him for the second match. That gave Lungi Ngidi an opportunity to reduce England to 30-3 but may also have contributed to England moving from there to 246-3, thanks to Dawid Malan and Jos Buttler. That was with 10 overs to go and they finished on 346-7. (The most colourful moment came when Moeen Ali for some reason attempted a one-handed reverse slog, aka a tennis forehand, and missed.)

South Africa could only manage 287 all out in reply, in large part thanks to what we’re presuming was heavy use of WD-40 rust remover allowing Jofra Archer to take 6-40.

Kyle Reese from The Terminator adds…

“There was a nuclear war, a few years from now, so this year’s 50-over World Cup is actually the final one. That makes it extra important with long-term bragging rights at stake. South Africa will be hoping they’re finally forging a team of winners out of adversity. England’s white ball gameplan is obviously more established. They’ll be hoping that the form and fitness of key players falls into place at the right time.

“You’re probably thinking, ‘Why are you talking like this, Reese? You’re from the future. Surely you know who won the 2023 50-over World Cup?’ Well sorry to break it to you, guys, but I wasn’t actually a massive cricket fan when I was growing up. I was kind of preoccupied working as a slave in one of Skynet’s concentration camps. Not much time for thumbing through old Wisdens, you know. Not too many Wisdens lying around at all to be quite honest with you.

“I’m looking forward to the tournament now though. I reckon India are going to be hard to beat.”

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We previewed the Boxing Day Tests. We may as well take a look at what happened in them.

Australia v South Africa

Signs of an upturn for South Africa, who finally passed 200 for the first time in many attempts. Their second innings 204 all out was enough to secure defeat by an innings and 182 runs.

Top scorer for the Aussies was David Warner, who made his first hundred in almost three years and then made another one in the very same innings. He then squeezed in both a retired hurt and a dismissal without adding any further runs.

Speaking afterwards, Warner added to the rich tradition of batters talking up the bowling on days when they’ve made a ton by describing an Anrich Nortje spell as the fastest he’s ever faced.

To be fair to Warner, there were some stats about saying it was somewhere up there, so it wasn’t a total self-aggrandising fiction. He also said a few more specifically nice things about Nortje and the effort he always seems to put in. Even so, it’s funny how bowlers always seem to be at their most incredible when they don’t actually get the batter out. “You won’t believe how incredible that bowling that wasn’t good enough to dismiss me was,” is the message.

The third and final Test starts next week. Suffering South Africa fans might like to ponder the nature of an Ashes tour where there would still be three Tests’ worth of unravelling still to come. Three Tests may seem tough, but there’s only really time for mild fraying.

Pakistan v New Zealand

New Zealand’s first Test back in Pakistan moved rather more conventionally than England’s, even if the weight of scoring was similar.

Responding to Pakistan’s 438, the tourists made 612-9. It did however take them 163 overs to reach 500 where England reached that mark in 75.

That comparison is not to do New Zealand down in the slightest. This match was at a different ground for a start. It’s just an attempt to contextualise the rather bonkers thing that Ben Stokes’ men did a few weeks ago.

Bangladesh v India

We included this when previewing the Boxing Day Tests but it didn’t actually make it that far in the end. It was however the best match of the three, India staggering their way to a target of 145 for the loss of seven wickets.

They only got there thanks to an unbeaten 71-run partnership between Shreyas Iyer and R Ashwin.

Of course Ashwin was there. Just of course. Immune to the pressure again. As we keep saying, R Ashwin is not like other people.

A few days after the match finished, Rishabh Pant apparently fell asleep at the wheel and totalled his car which then burst into flames. He had been travelling at “a lot of speed” according to the bus driver who helped drag him out. Pant has a few injuries but thankfully seems broadly okay.

Don’t drive tired, kids. Don’t drive quickly, kids. In fact don’t drive at all kids – wait until you’re adults and then take lessons and pass your test and all that.

The King Cricket email is a handy way of finding out the site has been updated during those periods when it’s all been a bit quiet because the writer has been otherwise engaged eating too much stilton.

Cricket has lots of laws, but also a couple of general rules. One rule is that Pakistan will generally defy expectations – whether high or low. Another is that South Africa will generally contrive a way of exiting world tournaments when everything seemed to be going swimmingly for them.

South Africa lost to the Netherlands today and failed to qualify for the T20 World Cup semi finals when no-one had really even been considering that a possibility.

But really, it was always on the cards. As soon as Pakistan lost their first two matches, their odds of finishing in the top two were massively slim. And everyone knows what that means. It means advantage Pakistan.

South Africa should have been aware of this. They should have seen the danger immediately. Maybe they did. Maybe they realised that Pakistan’s woeful start most likely meant they themselves would have to endure a crucial final group stage fixture against the Netherlands.

Remember Stuart Broad’s final over when the Netherlands beat England in 2009? The Netherlands are a side who can definitely serve up an entertainingly humiliating defeat to a higher profile side in a T20 World Cup.

Perhaps South Africa saw this scenario early. Perhaps they’ve been dwelling on it, chewing it over, building it up in their heads. Maybe they thought about their reputation and how defeat here would add a further sheen to it. That probably didn’t help.

Pakistan, meanwhile, are flying. High on life and blessed with unstoppable momentum, victory in this tournament is surely now a complete impossibility.

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We’re late on this one, but please bear with us because there’s one particular element (a face, if you’re wondering) which should not be overlooked.

Yesterday morning, King Cricket reader Ritesh drew attention to a wonky caption to a Getty photo he’d spotted. “Kohli celebrates after hitting the winning runs,” it read. And there was Virat Kohli celebrating in all his batting gear immediately after the winning runs against Pakistan were hit.

Except Kohli didn’t hit them, did he?

It’s one of those moments that sort of feels true, because Kohli played the decisive innings in that match and he was not out at the end. So in that respect it’s a small thing – true enough, you might even argue, in that it’s true to the narrative of that match.

But then a cricket match – and to a greater extent a world cup – is a rich, interwoven web of all sorts of narrative strands and if you start splattering Kohli-coloured dye all over the place, you will unavoidably discolour some of the other stories.

Because while Kohli is cool in a run chase, it takes a particular type of person to come into bat with two needed off the final delivery and retain the self control to actually leave the ball.

R Ashwin is not like other people. If you’ve heard him talk about his bowling, you know that. If you’ve seen him mankad Jos Butttler, you know that. If you’ve seen him read and appreciate an information board about East Devon’s Jurassic Coast, you know that. He once spoke about how he’d been doing “a bit of archaelogy” in his time off.

R Ashwin is a singular cricketer and a singular man and he honestly deserves better than to have his ice-blooded leave and chipped winning runs overshadowed by what was, admittedly, a pretty damn special Virat Kohli innings.

But despite winning more Test matches for India than anyone else in the last decade and repeatedly delivering magic moments like this, R Ashwin is by now quite used to being overshadowed by Kohli. Given that this overshadowing was for a long period fuelled by Kohli not picking him for Test matches outside India, you wonder whether somewhere deep inside that inquisitive, calculating mind, there might just be the merest soupcon of resentment.

So Slog of the Day…

Ashwin was bowling to South Africa’s Aiden Markram, who jumped down the pitch and slogged so hard he actually became momentarily airborne.

There are a lot of slogs in modern cricket and there is kind of an art to disguising them. As long as you keep some sort of form, you can pass most off as ‘controlled power hitting targetting a particular part of the ground’.

If you become airborne, your shot is not controlled. Also, if you hit it straight at a fielder, it is probably not that targetted (although Markram would of course argue that he was aiming over Virat Kohli).

Next came the fun bit.

Virat Kohli got himself into a really good position to take the catch.

And then completely failed to take the catch.

Virat Kohli then had a second go at taking the catch, this time from a highly awful position.

And again completely failed to take the catch.

You know, chances go down. That’s a thing that happens. We’re quite forgiving about it because cricketers actually drop a lot more than people think they do. But that doesn’t meant it isn’t still a striking and dramatic thing whenever it happens.

In the immediate aftermath, it’s very tempting to read things into people’s body language that probably aren’t really there.

You know the kind of thing that we mean. The chance has gone down, the ball is already on its way back and yet the bowler still looks like this…

And then this…

Probably that’s just plain old astonishment laced with disappointment. But it’s hard not to think about how unusually protracted the look is and whether there were any deeper emotions fuelling its extended lifespan. And who did he turn towards as well? What was that look all about?

Then again, if we’re looking for enmity, envy or jealousy, this is a man so focused on the fine detail of cricket matches that he didn’t notice 90,000 fans roaring when he came into bat for the decisive ball of the biggest match of all. It’s very hard to imagine R Ashwin giving a flying full toss about anything so mundane as ‘what other people think’.

T20 is a bit too complicated for us these days, so we’re instead celebrating one of cricket’s oldest and simplest pleasures via our Slog of the Day feature.

Ollie Robinson doesn’t do his pointing upper-cut celebration every time he takes a wicket, but he does it often enough that it certainly feels like he does.

Plenty of bowlers have had signature celebrations over the years – little sequences of actions they reflexively do in response to each dismissal. A lot of the time it feels like the same piece of footage played again and again, but the better ones vary within a recognisable framework. Dale Steyn’s chainsaw-starting/mole-punching move had huge emotional range, for example. One day he’d do it furiously; the next day he’d do it so furiously you’d worry his boiling blood was going to burst through his skin.

Ollie Robinson’s move is sneakily adaptable. You tend to think he always does it the same, but he doesn’t.

The basic shape of it is he jumps side-on and then delivers an upper-cut with index finger extended. When he arrived on the Test scene back when there were no crowds, it was immediately obvious that this swinging point was also punctuated by a loud, percussive “woo!”

It’s honestly not much different to his bowling action, only underarm.

But while those are the nuts and bolts of it, it seems there’s plenty of scope to mix things up a bit.

Sometimes it’s a relaxed point that calmly expresses relief. Sometimes it’s almost apologetic with the upper-cut delivered right near the torso so you’d have to be viewing from the right angle to even know it had happened.

Other times it’s full-blooded.

It can be hard to gauge eyelines on TV coverage, but it often seems to be preceded by a good eyeballing of the dismissed batter.

This week we learned that the eyeballing can sometimes come afterwards too, alongside a facial expression that seems to be equal parts Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Michael Ironside in Scanners and Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

There aren’t too many areas of life where you’d feel in any way comfortable being on the receiving end of that.

Memorable stuff. However Mohammad Nabi’s celebration v Pakistan in the 2019 World Cup remains our all-time favourite wicket celebration.

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Is this a thing now? Is the scheduled last Test of each summer forever destined to be played the following year?

We’re jumping the gun here, but there’s at least some sort of a chance we’re going to have to run a Sim Series here, isn’t there?

After first rain and then reign (hat tip, Ged Ladd) prevented play in the third Test between England and South Africa, it doesn’t seem totally beyond the bounds of possibility that they’ll just sack the thing off and maybe play it next year instead. There’s precedent after all.

Such a move would also address the fact that South Africa aren’t due to tour England again any time soon. Why arrange multiple tours when you could just spread the current one out a bit? Maybe play one day a year. It would be fun to revisit England and South Africa teams of years gone by on days four and five in 2026 and 2027.

To give a sense of what that would be like, these would be the teams if England and India were due to play day five of the final Test of the 2018 summer this week. They’re actually weirdly and disappointingly credible. We guess the world moves on way slower than we thought it did.

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After one innings victory apiece, the third and final Test between England and South Africa will surely end up either a high-scoring draw or a low-scoring tie. England’s new number five, Harry Brook, would presumably prefer the former as all things being equal that increases the chances he’ll make a few runs.

The “next cab off the rank” analogy is getting quite a few airings this morning, but it’s not one that makes sense to us. Taxi ranks are typically very orderly which means it’s obvious to everyone which vehicle is ‘next’.

Striving for inclusion in a Test cricket team is not like that. It’s more like waiting to be served at a busy UK bar where the queue exists only in the mind of the person or persons pulling the pints. An experienced bar person will have a mental log of the sequence in which everyone arrived at the bar and will serve them in order. An inexperienced bar person will serve whoever’s nearest and piss a lot of people off in the process.

If you’re a customer, you can’t assume you’re dealing with the former, so you need to be conspicuous. But at the same time, you can’t be toooo conspicuous, because then you mark yourself out as kind of a cock which is a great way of getting yourself demoted a few positions. (A semi-furious stare while actually, physically waving bank notes around was a memorable offence back when we worked behind a bar. Literally shouting “Oi!” was another that may be less archaic.)

Harry Brook’s got waiting to be served a pint of Test cricket about right. A blazing innings in The Hundred would be the equivalent of trying to use cash as a lure, but Brook’s conspicuousness has been better calibrated.

He started off by making a noticeable but low key entrance at the 2018 Under-19 World Cup. “There was something about Brook that had stardust on it,” observed our correspondent D Charlton at the time. Since then, he’s consistently kept himself prominent without ever giving the impression of being too attention-seeking.

He’s made high scores in low-scoring county matches, he’s been worth his place in the PSL and the Big Bash League without making it to the IPL, he’s made heaps of first-class runs and he’s made three figures when playing for England Lions.

So what you having, mate? And more importantly, are you going to become a regular?

The depressing arsehole that is autumn is waking from its slumbers. Pretty soon it will grip you in its rotting talons and bore you rigid with talk of Champions League places and VAR. “I wish the Lord would take me now,” you will think. Or at least that’s the fate that could befall you if you aren’t signed up for the regular shafts of summer sunshine that are the King Cricket emails. If we can make it past the winter solstice, we promise to drag you with us.

It’s good to be ambitious and open minded and not hidebound by the past. It’s maybe not quite so smart to talk about how you’re going to rewrite how Test cricket is played – particularly if you’re England.

Ben Stokes has mostly spoken well since he took on the captaincy, but this wasn’t one of his better comments.

“We’re trying to rewrite how Test cricket is being played in England,” he said after beating India a month ago.

Those four successive successful run chases – three against New Zealand and one against India – were probably worth getting carried away with, but carried away is surely what Stokes was. Because while those initial results represented a more impressive turnaround than Derek Zoolander’s revelation of ‘Magnum’, England were still fundamentally England – as they’ve just proven.

An innings defeat to South Africa didn’t feel like an aspect of something revolutionary and new. It didn’t feel new at all. If you’ve been watching England play Test cricket these last few years, it felt very, very familiar.

In which case presumably Stokes’ and Brendon McCullum’s attempted rewrite continues. And rightly so. As we said when England were riding somewhat higher: chasing near enough 400 to win in the fourth innings probably isn’t sustainable, but maybe the unambiguous mindset is. Anything that helps simplify the players’ approach will probably result in a net gain in a format where weaknesses don’t come much greater than second-guessing yourself.

The issue is not the attempt to rewrite something (England’s Test game) that previously didn’t read very well at all. That’s an entirely logical thing to do. The issue is crowing about this amazing new novel you’ve come up with when all you’ve really done is string a couple of early chapters together.

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