The Australian team is set to face Scotland in their final match. However, ahead of their final group match, Australian skipper Mitchell Marsh got an interesting suggestion: as the defending champions England are on the verge of getting eliminated in the tournament, former Australian skipper Mitchell Marsh wants Australia to manipulate the result of their final encounter so that England gets eliminated from the tournament.
England are placed in Group B but have failed to win a single match so far in this edition of the World Cup, and they have a net run rate of -1.800. They have two games left, but even if they win their next two matches, they will not be able to surpass Scotland in terms of the net run rate. They are sitting firmly on number 2 with 5 points and a net run rate of 2.164.
In order to get to the Super 8, England needs to win their last two matches by a big margin, and they even want Australia to beat Scotland by a huge margin.
Speaking about the same Australian skipper, Tim Paine said that he doesn’t want Australia to lose by a big margin but wants Australia to win a close encounter against Scotland.
Tim Paine said, “I’m not sure what the net run rate looks like; you don’t have to lose the game; I think they can just let Scotland get close enough. Again, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves; Scotland could have a day out. But say Scotland batted first and got to 140, and we chased it off 19.5 overs to make sure they didn’t suffer a big net run rate loss.
I think England have to win both of their games by about 50 runs to even get up to Scotland’s net run rate. So, it’s certainly plausible that you can win the game (but still ensure England don’t progress),” he added.
Even Australian pacer Hazelwood said the same thing: In this tournament, you could potentially come up against England at some stage again. They’re probably one of the top few teams on their day, and we’ve had some real struggles against them in T20 cricket, so if we can get them out of the tournament, that’s in our best interest as well as probably everyone else.”
However, if anything like that happens, Australian skipper Mitchell Marsh may face a ban from the ICC in two of the three Super 8 matches, as per the reports in ESPNcricinfo.
Marsh may be charged under Article 2.11 of the ICC’s code of conduct, which is for the prevention of manipulation of games for “inappropriate strategic or tactical reasons… such as when a team deliberately loses a pool match in an ICC event in order to affect the standings of other teams in that ICC event.”