Australia face tall but not mathematically impossible task to keep T20 hopes alive | Geoff Lemon

Run rate shapes as kingmaker with the World Cup hosts, along with New Zealand and England, expected to bank final-round wins

And now, the end is near. And so we face the final curtain. A bit dramatic for the end of the group stages of a Twenty20 World Cup, but soon eight teams out of a dozen will be heading home or to their next assignments, thinking about what might have been and the disappointment of what wasn’t. And in Group 1, at least, the matter of which two teams get to stay a little longer will come down to pure and beautiful arithmetic.

Arriving at this tournament, England and Australia would have been worldly enough to know that they couldn’t expect to walk out of this group. They were diplomatic enough to cite every opponent as a tough competitor who could beat them on a given day. They were seasoned enough to know that this was true. And in their hearts, they would still have known that they should be the two to progress. The two biggest and best-resourced teams, one the host, the other the pace-setter in short form cricket for the last seven years.