England's 2022 T20 World Cup Triumph

England won the 2022 T20 World Cup having lost to Ireland, having been rescued by a Melbourne downpour, and having qualified for the semi-finals in second place on net run rate. Two matches later they were world champions, and a fortnight after that the campaign was already being described as a demonstration of squad depth rather than the near-miss it very nearly was.

Both readings hold. England's group stage was genuinely precarious and would have ended in elimination on a drier week. What they then did to India at Adelaide and to Pakistan at the Melbourne Cricket Ground was as controlled as anything an England white-ball side has produced, and the players who decided both matches — Sam Curran, Alex Hales, Ben Stokes — had all been outside the first-choice XI at some point in the preceding two years.

The result also completed something no team had done before. England held the fifty-over World Cup from 2019 and now held the Twenty20 title as well, the first side ever to hold both at the same time. It was their second T20 World Cup, drawing them level with West Indies on two.

A captain four months into the job

Eoin Morgan retired in June 2022 and Jos Buttler was appointed captain of both white-ball sides on 30 June, giving him roughly four months before the tournament began. That is not much time to reshape a side, and Buttler did not try to. The change he is credited with is narrower and more useful: giving Curran and Stokes unambiguous roles rather than flexible ones.

For Curran that meant new-ball and death overs as a specialist rather than a fill-in, which is what he ended up winning the tournament as. For Stokes it meant batting in the top four with a licence to play the long, unglamorous innings that Twenty20 sides usually cannot accommodate — which is exactly the innings that won the final.

Buttler became only the second England captain to win a T20 World Cup, the first having done it in 2010. The longer story of how England's white-ball cricket was rebuilt after 2015 into a side capable of this is set out in England's white-ball revolution.

The format, and why the Super 12 punished mistakes

Sixteen teams played the 2022 tournament. Eight of them contested two first-round groups of four, with the top two from each joining the eight pre-qualified sides in a Super 12 stage of two groups of six. England were among the pre-qualified, on the strength of the 2021 tournament, so their competition began at the Super 12.

The arithmetic of a six-team group with five matches is unforgiving. Two defeats usually eliminates a side, one defeat plus a washout leaves you needing to win everything else, and net run rate decides ties — which in Australian conditions, at grounds with boundaries as long as Perth's and the MCG's, is very hard to manufacture late. England's group contained Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Ireland, which meant three sides capable of beating them and two capable of beating them on a given afternoon.

The rules of the format that mattered most were the ones governing rain: how many overs constitute a match, and how a revised target is set. Both came into play twice for England in eight days. The method is explained in Duckworth-Lewis-Stern explained.

Perth, 22 October: Curran's five for ten

England opened against Afghanistan at Perth Stadium and won by five wickets, but the number that mattered was the bowling analysis. Sam Curran took five for 10 — the first five-wicket haul by an England bowler in a Twenty20 international.

Perth is the fastest surface in Australia and the ball moved for the seamers early. Curran's method was not pace: it was slower balls into the surface and a full length at the stumps, bowled to a plan against batters looking to hit through the line. Afghanistan were dismissed cheaply and England chased without much trouble.

It is worth flagging how unusual that spell was in context. England had used Curran as a fourth or fifth bowling option for most of his international career. Within three weeks he would be player of the tournament.

Melbourne, 26 October: beaten by Ireland

Four days later England lost to Ireland at the Melbourne Cricket Ground by five runs on the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, in a match interrupted and eventually stopped by rain.

The result stands as one of the two or three biggest upsets in the tournament's history, and it was not a fluke of the calculation — England were behind the required rate when the weather ended the match, and Ireland had bowled well. For an England side that had arrived as favourites, it left them needing results from three difficult fixtures.

Then the weather intervened in their favour. England's Super 12 match against Australia at the same ground was abandoned without a result, which cost the hosts as much as it cost England and, in the final accounting, kept England's qualification alive.

Brisbane and Sydney: qualifying the hard way

On 1 November at the Gabba, England beat New Zealand by 20 runs. Buttler made 73 and Glenn Phillips replied with 62; the difference was England's bowling in the middle overs against a New Zealand side who had topped the group to that point.

On 5 November at the Sydney Cricket Ground, England beat Sri Lanka by four wickets in the match that decided qualification. Pathum Nissanka made 67 for Sri Lanka and Alex Hales 47 in the chase, and England got home with wickets in hand but without much comfort.

That left Group 1 settled on net run rate. New Zealand and England finished level on record — three wins, one defeat, one abandoned match each — and New Zealand went through first with a net run rate of 2.113 to England's 0.473. Second place meant a semi-final against India rather than Pakistan, which at the time looked like the harder draw.

England's Super 12, Group 1	Venue	Result
v Afghanistan, 22 Oct	Perth Stadium	Won by 5 wickets
v Ireland, 26 Oct	Melbourne Cricket Ground	Lost by 5 runs (DLS)
v Australia	Melbourne Cricket Ground	Abandoned, no result
v New Zealand, 1 Nov	The Gabba, Brisbane	Won by 20 runs
v Sri Lanka, 5 Nov	Sydney Cricket Ground	Won by 4 wickets

Adelaide: the semi-final that stopped being a contest

The semi-final against India at Adelaide Oval is the most one-sided knockout match England have played in a global tournament, and it was decided entirely by the opening partnership.

Hales and Buttler had already put on 81 against New Zealand and 75 against Sri Lanka. At Adelaide they added an unbroken 170, a record opening stand, and England chased India's total down without losing a wicket. Hales finished on 86 not out and was named player of the match.

What made it striking was how conventional the batting was. Adelaide has short square boundaries and a long straight one, and both batters simply hit across the ground rather than trying to clear the longest part of it. India's seamers had no length that worked and their spinners were attacked from the first over of their spells. For a semi-final in Australia against a full-strength India, it was over inside the first ten overs of the chase.

Hales's presence in the side at all was notable. He had been out of England's white-ball teams for over three years before being recalled in the run-up to the tournament. The wider rivalry that this semi-final sits inside is covered in England against India.

The MCG final, 13 November

England played Pakistan in front of 80,462 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Buttler won the toss and put Pakistan in, on a ground and under a sky that both favoured bowling first.

Pakistan made 137 for eight. Shan Masood top-scored with 38 from 28 balls, Babar Azam made 32 and Mohammad Rizwan 15. England's bowling was the story: Curran took three for 12 from his four overs, Adil Rashid two for 22 and Chris Jordan two for 27. Between them the three took seven of the eight wickets to fall.

The chase was not straightforward. Buttler made 26 from 17 and fell, Harry Brook added 20, and England were still some way short at the halfway point of their innings. Haris Rauf took two for 23, and Shaheen Shah Afridi finished with one for 13 from the overs he was able to bowl.

Then the match turned on an injury. Attempting a catch in the thirteenth over, Afridi damaged his right knee and left the field, and Pakistan spent the closing overs a frontline bowler short. England took 41 from the last five overs.

Ben Stokes finished on 52 not out from 49 balls, with five fours and a single six. It was his first fifty in a Twenty20 international, which is a strange fact about a player of his reputation and tells you something about the role he had usually been given in the format. England won by five wickets with an over to spare, reaching 138 for five in 19 overs.

Curran took both individual awards, player of the match and player of the tournament. Across the competition Virat Kohli made the most runs with 296 and Wanindu Hasaranga took the most wickets with 15 — neither of them for a finalist, which is a reasonable summary of a tournament decided by teams rather than by individual weight of runs.

What the win actually established

Three things, and only one of them is about the trophy.

The first is the double. England held the fifty-over World Cup won in 2019 and now the Twenty20 title, the first side to hold both simultaneously. That is a genuine landmark for a country that had reached three fifty-over finals before 2019 and lost all of them. The other half of the pair is covered in the 50-over Cricket World Cup and the tournament itself in the T20 World Cup.

The second is squad construction. The tournament was won by Curran bowling four overs a match as a specialist, Hales opening after three years out, and Stokes batting through the middle overs of a final. None of the three would have been in an England side picked purely on recent form, and the campaign is now cited internally as the case for keeping a wider pool than a first XI. England's records across formats are collected in England cricket team records.

The third is a caution. England lost a semi-final in 2021, lost to Ireland in the group stage in 2022, and have not sustained the level since. The 2022 win was the product of a very good four days at the end of a shaky fortnight, and the players said so at the time rather than pretending otherwise. Twenty20 tournaments reward sides that survive to a knockout with their best players available, which is a different quality from being the best side in the world over a year.

The domestic competition those players came out of is described in the T20 Blast, and the newer eight-team tournament that has reshaped the English white-ball calendar since in the Hundred explained. The wider English game is mapped out on the cricket in England hub.

Sources and method

Match dates, venues, results, margins and individual figures in this guide were checked against published scorecards and the tournament's official records rather than recalled, including Curran's five for 10 at Perth, the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern result against Ireland, the group standings and net run rates, the record opening stand at Adelaide, and the full detail of the final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The attendance figure for the final is the published official figure. Buttler's appointment date as white-ball captain, and the tournament's format and pre-qualification rules, come from board and ICC announcements. Where a specific individual score in a semi-final or group match could not be confirmed against a scorecard, it has been left out rather than estimated. Nothing in this guide is computed from our own datasets.