ICC World Cup 2023: It’s pack up for Pak

Babar Azam walks back after being dismissed for 38 against England on Saturday. Pic/Getty Images

Even for those that had stayed back, the end would have come as a relief.

Pakistan, never quite suggesting they could make a match of it, handed England a 93-run victory at the Eden Gardens on Saturday, dragging the hopelessly one-sided joust to the 44th over. England had put 337 for 9 on the board, a target Babar & Co couldn't threaten even for a moment right through their ‘chase'. Agha Salman got a fifty, a few others got a start and the 10th wicket added 53 off 35, but it was all woefully inadequate.

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Stokes entertains again

Ben Stokes, flush from a 84-ball 108 against the Netherlands on Wednesday, played another entertaining innings, hammering 84 in 76 deliveries to the delight of some 40,000 who had turned up on the terraces despite so little being at stake in the match. The southpaw, surely in his final World Cup match, hit 11 boundaries and a couple of sixes as England's top order came good with Jonny Bairstow (59 off 61) and Joe Root (60 off 72) too making substantial contributions. Root had gone without a fifty in his previous six matches.

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England's Ben Stokes en route his 84 against Pakistan at the Eden Gardens on Saturday. Pic/PTI

The collective sigh of disappointment as Jos Buttler declared they would bat first had summed it up. Pakistan, faced with ‘impossible' targets as options for a place in the semi-finals, had been dealt a killer blow even before the first ball had been bowled. It was just as well, because Babar Azam & Co were thus set free to concentrate on a match they needed to win and salvage some pride. As soon as the Pakistan reply had gone past the fourth ball of the seventh over, it became official - at the Wankhede on Wednesday, it'll be India versus New Zealand. But, by then the chance of completing a successful chase had all but gone out of the window with the openers back in the pavilion - among them the big-hitting Fakhar Zaman.

Solid start by England

Earlier, Dawid Malan and Bairstow laid the platform for England with an opening stand of 82, both having to weather a passing storm as Shaheen Afridi and Haris Rauf found both pace and movement when they began. The ball beat the outer-edge often with Afridi bending it away from the left-handed Malan and Rauf ‘roughing up' his right-handed partner. Malan should have departed even before he had scored but Afridi failed to grab a return catch in his second over. The lanky left-arm pacer would in his next spell give Ben Stokes, then on 10, a reprieve in identical fashion and Pakistan were made to pay before Afridi made amends with a yorker that hit the base of the left-handers' off-stump.

Some skillful bowling at the ‘death' by Rauf prevented England from an even bigger total.

Brief scores
England 337-9 in 50 overs (B Stokes 84, J Root 60, J Bairstow 59, D Malan 31; H Rauf 3-64, S Afridi 2-72, M Wasim 2-74) beat Pakistan 244 all out in 43.3 overs (A Salman 51, B Azam 38, M Rizwan 36, H Rauf 35; D Willey 3-56, G Atkinson, A Rashid 2-55, M Ali 2-60) by 93 runs