Cricket World Cup 2019: Four years planning and England scrape into semi-finals by a fingernail

Four years of planning went into England’s 2019 World Cup campaign. From the moment he assumed the post as director of England men’s cricket in 2015, Andrew Strauss was adamant that no detail would be overlooked in search of the perfect winning strategy. The entire central contract structure was overhauled to redress the balance between white-ball and red-ball cricket. Players were, for the first time, encouraged to go to foreign Twenty20 tournaments like the Big Bash and the Indian Premier League to pick up new skills and learn to play in high-pressure environments.

The whole culture of the team, the tone of England’s demeanour towards one-day cricket, were completely rewired. Match-winning players like Jason Roy and Adil Rashid were identified years in advance, with the hope that they would reach maturity in 2019. As far back as last summer, team analyst Nathan Leamon was already being pulled off his day-to-day duties to work on World Cup projects.

The military precision extends to practice. England use five different weighted balls to train specific facets of the game, be they range-hitting or slip-catching. Ahead of Wednesday’s game against New Zealand at Durham, the TV cameras picked up on yet another innovation: as Joe Root practised taking slip catches off spin bowling, a set of foam stumps had been installed directly in front of him in an attempt to replicate last-minute deflections off the keeper’s gloves.

These are the lengths that England have gone to in pursuit of their first ever men’s World Cup triumph. Painstaking preparation, ceaseless strategising, exhaustive analysis, an attention verging on obsession. And so, here we are: qualification for the semi-finals secured by just a single point, and in truth by even finer margins than that. Or, to put it another way: after four years, 34 players, 97 matches, hundreds of meetings, thousands of hours and millions of pounds investment, perhaps all that separated England from World Cup disaster, in the end, was the length of Mark Wood’s fingernails.

If that sounds like a bit of a stretch, then it’s nothing compared to the stretch Wood pulled off to get the faintest of touches on the ball to run out Kane Williamson when New Zealand were 61-2 and just beginning to threaten. And even if England were still well ahead of the game by that point, reaching that point had already required England to make numerous borrowings against their reserves of good fortune.

Take the first over of New Zealand’s chase, for example, and Henry Nicholls failing to review an LBW off Chris Woakes that would clearly have bounced over the stumps. Or the very first ball of the match, a dangerous skidder from Mitchell Santner that Roy tried to cut but ended up – somehow – beating both the inside edge and Roy’s leg-stump. Only when Roy was finally out for 60 in the 19th over, having put on 123 with Jonny Bairstow and established an advantage that England would never relinquish, could we calculate the true value of that particular escape.

Or we could go further back still, to the must-win game against India at Edgbaston, when Roy was caught behind off the glove, only for Virat Kohli to refuse a review. Or the multiple inside edges for four off Jonny Bairstow’s bat early in his innings of 111. Or the fact that in England’s two most important group games, Eoin Morgan won two crucial tosses and got first use of an exceptional surface against two teams who were already virtually guaranteed of qualification.

Even the format has played to their advantage: only this flabby nine-game marathon would have forgiven two such supine performances as those we saw against Sri Lanka and Australia, or allow the likes of Roy to recover from a torn hamstring. While six of their rivals have had matches ruined by weather, England have escaped unscathed: imagine, by contrast, if their thumpings against Afghanistan or the West Indies had been curtailed by rain.

For all their occasional brilliance, England have led a charmed tournament. Their good fortune may yet have endured: by finishing third, they have ensured a semi-final at Edgbaston, perhaps their favourite venue, and the ground with the highest runs per wicket this tournament, where the smaller boundaries will suit their power hitters a little better than Old Trafford.

Maybe there’s a certain irony in the fact that after four years of leaving nothing to chance, England have only just scraped into the last four by shamelessly riding their luck. There’s nothing new in this, of course: Sri Lanka in 1996 and Kenya in 2003 both reached the last four as a result of opponents forfeiting, while in 1992 Pakistan ascribed their triumph – from the brink of early elimination – to the “Allah factor”. Equally, perhaps there’s also a sense here not of divine providence, but of cards falling into place, of momentum accumulating, of a campaign finally sharpening to a point. As we reach the high-wire stage of this World Cup, perhaps the most important factor is not how lucky England have been, but how lucky they now feel.