It's not often that a team has another one's destiny in its own hands in a multi-nation tournament. The stakes rise when the other team is your oldest rival. "If we can get them out of the tournament that's in our best interest as well as probably everyone else," said Australian quick Josh Hazlewood, almost sounding like he and his team would be doing themselves and the other teams a favour by playing a helping hand in making Scotland go through into the Super 8 in the ongoing ICC Men's T20 World Cup at the expense of the defending champions, England.
Australia confirmed their spot in the Super 8 with a handsome win against Namibia on Tuesday, June 11 (local time) and now have an opportunity to knock out their arch-rivals England, in their final Group B game against Scotland on Saturday, June 15. Scotland already have five points in their kitty, the maximum which England can reach and have a +3.965 lead on NRR over their European rivals. A washout against Scotland and a 36-run loss to Australia hasn't helped England's squad and now they have been left at mercy of their biggest rival to get through the group stage.
"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. 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," Hazlewood said at the press conference after win against Namibia.
Even if Australia beat Scotland by not that big a margin, the Richie Berrington-led side should have enough in their NRR to stand a challenge to England. For that, however, England will have to beat both Oman and Namibia by colossal margins to boost their net run rate in the first place.
"Whether you get close and you just knock it around and drag it 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," Hazlewood added.
England play Oman on Thursday, June 13 in Antigua as they are still searching for their first win.
