England thrash sorry India to set up T20 World Cup final against Pakistan

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England somersaulted and cartwheeled their way to a stunning and historic thrashing of India in Adelaide to rocket into the T20 World Cup final, as Alex Hales and Jos Buttler took what at the halfway stage looked a testing target and toyed with it like a cat might a ball of wool, making it look approximately as threatening, to lead their side home with all 10 wickets and fully four overs to spare.

Chasing 169, Hales (who scored 86 off 47) and Buttler (80 off 49) produced not just the largest but in any sense you like the greatest opening partnership in England’s T20 history (Hales has now been involved in all of England’s top five). By the end India were a rabble; there was an all-run four, vanishingly rare in this format, when Mohammed Shami fielded and tried to toss the ball to a teammate but missed, and another boundary when Buttler skied the ball over mid-off and Suryakumar Yadav not only dropped the catch – a difficult one, to be fair, with the ball dropping over his shoulder – but shovelled the ball a further 10 yards to the rope.

The ground that witnessed England’s lowest hour in white-ball cricket, against Bangladesh in 2015, thus witnessed what stands perhaps just the 2019 World Cup final away from their finest. A performance in which a side that had not really reached top gear at any stage in this tournament suddenly went supersonic.

For long periods they were also excellent with the ball, Adil Rashid outstanding for the second successive match. But they allowed India to hurt them in the final overs, India scoring 60 off the last four.

Yadav, their most dangerous batter, made little impact – he fell to Rashid having made 14 off 10 – but Virat Kohli got a 40-ball half-century (and was out next ball) while the relatively unheralded Hardik Pandya ran amok. His 63 here nearly doubled his total for the tournament – which now stands at 128 – and took him just 33 balls, before he stepped on his stumps in the process of hitting the last ball of the innings for what would have been his 10th boundary.

Chasing what was in the end, and in the context of this tournament, a daunting total England took a quite different approach to their innings to India, in that they tried to score quite quickly at the beginning of it. It took Buttler and Hales until the second ball of the fourth over to reach the same score – 31 – India had at the end of their powerplay; they reached 50 off their 29th ball, when it had taken India 43. At the end of their own powerplay England’s total stood at 63, more than double India’s at the same point in their innings.

It was a spectacular vindication for Buttler’s decision at the toss to chase, which while very much his instinct most of the time stood out of keeping with the fresh consensus that has settled over this tournament. It seemed to be this consensus that informed India’s innings – only one team in the tournament, and none at all in the Super 12s, had successfully chased over 160, therefore 168 would be an excellent score. England on the other hand had been positively salivating over the state of the wicket for three days and thought there might be more runs in it. Turned out they had a point.