New Zealand run out of road against peerless Pakistan

Three times in this men's T20 World Cup, New Zealand batted first and won. Three times, they scored at more than eight runs an over through the innings. Twice, they did so at the SCG. Twice in those games, they had batters posting scores north of 90.

New Zealand batted first at the SCG again on Wednesday, but nothing else about the above followed the script in their men's T20 World Cup semi-final against Pakistan. The match was played on the same strip where the Kiwis piled up 200/3, the tournament's second-highest total, against Australia in the first match of the second round on October 22. Seventeen days on, they were held to a middling total of 152/4; their lowest except for the 150/9 they made chasing against the English.

Wednesday's pitch was a reasonable facsimile of a subcontinent surface, but that matters next to nothing in this format. What did matter was that Pakistan applied the pressure immediately and kept it on. So, for New Zealand, there was no charging off to a powerplay of 65/1 or 52/1, which was how they rolled against Australia and Ireland. Instead, they were 38/2 after six overs. Neither could they latch onto the kind of recovery they mounted against Sri Lanka, who reduced them to 15/3 in four overs but then let it slip to a total of 167/7 with Glenn Philips' 104 the pivotal performance.

The powerplay was bookended by Shaheen Afridi trapping Finn Allen in front with the third ball of the match and Shadab Khan at mid-off running out Devon Conway on the last delivery of the sixth over. Pakistan's grip tightened two overs later when Phillips blipped a return catch to Mohammad Nawaz. At 49/3 after eight, New Zealand needed stability. They got it from Williamson and Daryll Mitchell in their 50-ball stand of 68, which was followed by Mitchell and James Neesham clipping an unbroken 35 off 22. Mitchell showed focus and application for his unbeaten 53, which came off 35 deliveries, featured only 18 runs in fours and sixes, and was his slowest half-century at a strike rate of 151.42.

Williamson said afterwards the New Zealanders believed, between innings, that they might have scored enough runs: "After being put under pressure we summed up what we thought could be competitive on that pitch. I do believe that was defendable if we were outstanding with our second half [of the game]. We weren't quite at our best and Pakistan were outstanding. That's not an ideal recipe to win. That's frustrating but that's cricket. You always ebb and flow. You always try and navigate where you need to be as a team, and what sort of overs you can try and target to give yourself a good chance. We thought we were very much in the game at the halfway stage. We wanted to put out a better performance all round and it wasn't to be."

But it would - and it will - take more than merely steady batting to stop this Pakistan team, even with Trent Boult and Tim Southee on hand to do what they have done so well together for so long. Mohammad Rizwan and Babar Azam compiled their team's best powerplay of the tournament, 55/0, a stand that swelled to 105. It should have been ended with the fifth delivery of the game and the first Babar faced, and which he edged. Conway failed to hold a catch wicketkeepers would expect to take. Maybe that's the sort of thing that's bound to happen when you give the gloves and pads to someone who has done the job in only seven of his 120 first-class matches - where 'keepers who are not born can be made.

Babar holed out to long-on off Boult for 53 off 42 in the 13th. His dismissal left Pakistan to score 48 off 44, and with Rizwan in command there was no way they were going anywhere else but to Melbourne for Sunday's final. Boult had Rizwan caught in the deep for a 43-ball 57. By then, it hardly mattered. Pakistan had risen above their required run-rate by the end of the third over and they never looked back.

The pause after that over seemed as good a time as any for "Dil Dil Pakistan" to boom out of the ground's speakers, and it was especially enthusiastically taken up by the fans in the Bill O'Reilly and Victor Trumper stands to the east. The wave of song and dance had barely subsided when Babar drove Lockie Ferguson down the ground with exquisitely sweet timing. It was less a cricket stroke than a poem.

You might as well have called the game then and there. But other moments stuck out from the blur. Ferguson was also bowling when Babar worked the last ball of the 11th to midwicket and looked for two to reach what would be his first half-century not only in the tournament but in his last seven innings. Unkindly, the ball ricocheted off the match's first half-centurion, Mitchell, to take Babar to the milestone.

Pakistan won with five balls remaining, but this was a hiding. Williamson tried not to get dragged into discussing why New Zealand has lost nine of the dozen semi-finals they have reached in either form of the World Cup, saying he preferred to concentrate "on performance". That meant, essentially, this: "They were too good today and we weren't quite at our best. We wanted to make them work harder for those runs."

Williamson is among the most cool-headed players in the game, a cricketer who never seems anywhere near the end of his tether on the field, who settles on a plan and sticks to it, who is all about logic and maintaining equilibrium. He couldn't be less like a Pakistani if he tried, which at least partly explains why he won't play at the MCG on Sunday.