England challenge the status quo

This was the game that the World Cup so desperately needed. The assumptions gleaned from the past three weeks of competition were that four teams had formed their own breakaway league-within-a-league (with Australia leading the charge, and New Zealand, Sri Lanka and South Africa tracking them all the way) and that the rest would have to be content to share the scraps - England's underachievers chief among the beggars.

Such assumptions were ever so nearly shattered today. England put a month of misdirection behind them to reprise the sort of form that won them the CB Series in Australia, while Sri Lanka let their lofty standards slip after losing the toss and being invited to set the pace. England, in the words of their captain, Michael Vaughan, were "outstanding in the field and outstanding with the ball", and thanks to the unheralded exploits of Ravi Bopara and Paul Nixon, came within an ace of an unquantifiably important result.

And yet they still lost, and the narrowness of the defeat was a very bitter pill for Vaughan to swallow afterwards. You could sense the fury coursing through his veins as he contemplated the squandering of a golden opportunity to round on his critics. "Not many people gave us a chance of putting in a performance," he said pointedly, "but the players can be very proud of the way that they played today."

None can be more proud than Bopara, who showed himself to be a cricketer of immense substance, despite the fact that, at a month short of his 22nd birthday, he had never yet been in a situation to compare with the one he was thrust into today. "I'm the type of guy who'll go out and look at my areas and not get too emotional," he said afterwards. "I just played the way I play for Essex." That way had produced seven fifties and a hundred in 64 previous one-day games, but in his own words, the one that got away had left him "gutted".

Bopara did at least collect a consolation prize - he was named Man of the Match for his efforts, an award that he accepted with much the same sense of desolation that Wakefield's Don Fox displayed at Wembley in 1968, after missing a final-minute sitter in the Challenge Cup final. It was an acknowledgement of the coolness and promise of his youth, but it was also cruelly apposite for England's performance as a whole - today England played just about as well as they could, but they still came up short.

"Losing two early wickets was not ideal," said Vaughan, referring to his third-ball dismissal and the subsequent scalping of the off-colour Ed Joyce. "But we recovered to 101 for 2 and that's a position you'd buy every game. If you can be 101 for 2 with 25 overs left you sometimes should be getting over 233. Today it wasn't to be."

If Vaughan is happy to buy that sort of platform every game, then clearly England are not in the best of bargaining positions in this tournament. "We kept wickets in hand, and we definitely thought we should have gone 250-255 easily," said Mahela Jayawardene, showing a far more ambitious frame of mind. "I'm glad we came up winners because I thought we played much better cricket today."

That's possibly not entirely true. England were very impressive in patches today. Their bowling in particular was a revelation, with Sajid Mahmood returning his best one-day figures of 4 for 50 against the very same opponents who butchered him in the one-day series last summer.

England, so profligate in the early rounds, conceded just four wides all day - three of which came from Mahmood's ante-penultimate delivery of the innings. That very lack of width was instrumental in keeping the deadly Sanath Jayasuriya in check, while his opening partner-in-crime, Upul Tharanga, took 79 deliveries to record his first boundary.

"There were just a couple of errors in the batting," conceded Vaughan, who inevitably cited Kevin Pietersen's dismissal to Muttiah Muralitharan as a pivotal moment of the match. "He was our star player playing nicely, and their star bowler got him out. It was a bitter blow, and at 130 for 6, I was thinking it was all over, but the partnership that Ravi and Nixon produced was spectacular. I just wish we'd got over the line."

Australia are England's next opponents, on Sunday, and such are the permutations of the Super Eights, England simply cannot afford to lose if they are to sneak through to the semi-finals. But if today proved one thing, it was that England's brand of percentage-play cricket can, in the right conditions and against the right off-colour opponents, come up trumps. The fact that they did their best and failed, however, was probably much more revealing.