England won the toss and opted to field first in the ICC T20 World Cup final match being played at the Melbourne Cricket Stadium. Unchanged team for England, so no Wood, no Willey, no Malan. Jordan and Salt play.
Babar would have bowled first, “we’ll try to put runs on the board and put pressure on. The way the team is playing is outstanding. History repeats [from 1992]… we’ll do our best.”
Pakistan are unchanged too… here we go!
Pakistan: 1 Babar Azam (capt), 2 Mohammad Rizwan, 3 Mohammad Haris, 4 Shan Masood, 5 Iftikhar Ahmed, 6 Mohammad Nawaz, 7 Shadab Khan, 8 Mohammad Wasim, 9 Naseem Shah, 10 Haris Rauf, 11 Shaheen Shah Afridi.
England: 1 Jos Buttler (capt & wk), 2 Alex Hales, 3 Phil Salt, 4 Ben Stokes, 5 Harry Brook, 6 Liam Livingstone, 7 Moeen Ali, 8 Sam Curran, 9 Chris Woakes, 10 Chris Jordan, 11 Adil Rashid.
Earlier, the highly anticipated T20 World Cup final between Pakistan and England has been postponed, and the toss will now take place at 12:30 p.m. rather than 12:22 p.m.
It’s drizzling in Melbourne at the moment but the dark cloud hovering over the entire Australian city. The La Nina weather phenomenon has put the T20 World Cup 2022 final between Pakistan and England today under serious threat.
The Bureau of Meteorology of Australia has predicted almost 80-90% chances of non-stop rain starting from 5:30PM local time. This means the summit clash can be moved to the reserve day on Monday (tomorrow).
“Cloudy. Very high (near 100%) chance of showers. The chance of a thunderstorm, possibly severe with heavy falls. Winds east to northeasterly 15 to 25 km/h turning north to northwesterly 25 to 35 km/h during the morning then decreasing to 15 to 20 km/h in the evening,” the Australia MET department has predicted.
On the reserve day, a 3 pm (local time) slot has been allotted with an additional two hours in place to complete the game. But the frustration might continue on the back-up day as well with the meteorological department predicting a 95 percent chance of showers (5 to 10 mm) on Monday.
There will be some nervous looks skywards over the coming days in Melbourne with rain threatening the men’s T20 World Cup final, raising the prospect of the reserve day being needed and even a shared trophy.
For the knockout matches in the tournament a minimum of 10 overs per side is needed to constitute a match, compared to five overs during the group stages.
