2019 World Cup Final: New Zealand at Lord's

Fourteenth of July 2019, Lord's. New Zealand made 241 for eight. England made 241 all out. The Super Over that followed produced fifteen runs apiece. Nothing separated the two sides across a hundred and two overs of cricket, so the trophy was awarded on a tiebreaker nobody in the ground could have quoted from memory that morning: England had hit twenty-six boundaries in their innings, New Zealand seventeen.

That is the whole match in four sentences, and it explains nothing. What made the day extraordinary was not the arithmetic but the sequence of small physical accidents that produced it — a fielder's heel finding a foam cushion, a throw striking the back of a diving batter's bat, a wide called on the first ball of a two-ball chase. Any one of them falling the other way and New Zealand are world champions.

Kane Williamson's side had arrived at Lord's as the fourth qualifier from a ten-team round robin, having lost three of their last four group games. They left it as the team that had beaten India in the semi-final and had not, technically, lost the final either.

The squad Williamson took to England

New Zealand went into the tournament with the shape they had been building since the 2015 final: Williamson batting at three and holding the innings together, Ross Taylor at four, Martin Guptill opening, and a bowling group built around Trent Boult's left-arm swing and Lockie Ferguson's raw pace. Tom Latham kept wicket and batted in the lower middle order. Colin de Grandhomme and Jimmy Neesham supplied the seam-bowling all-round cover, Mitchell Santner the left-arm spin, and Matt Henry the second new-ball option.

It was not a side that overwhelmed anybody. It won by being harder to get past than it looked, which is a description that fits most of the country's best teams and is treated at length in the guide to New Zealand's underdog cricket identity.

Five wins, three defeats, one washout

The group stage divided cleanly in half. New Zealand's first four fixtures produced three wins and a rained-off match: Sri Lanka were beaten by ten wickets, Bangladesh by three, Afghanistan by seven, and the game against India at Trent Bridge was abandoned without a result. Williamson made centuries against South Africa and the West Indies, the first of them steering a four-wicket win at Edgbaston.

That West Indies game, at Old Trafford on 22 June, is worth pausing on. Williamson made 148, his highest score in one-day internationals, after New Zealand had slipped to seven for two, and the total reached 291 for eight. The West Indies were nine down and still fifty short when Carlos Brathwaite decided to win it in sixes. He got to 101 from 82 balls, with nine fours and five sixes, and with six needed from seven deliveries he hit Neesham high towards long-on. Boult judged it, caught it, and kept his feet inside the rope. New Zealand won by five runs. Three weeks later, at Lord's, the same fielder in almost the same position got his heel wrong.

Then the wheels came off. Pakistan won by six wickets, Australia by eighty-six runs, and England — in the last group match, at Chester-le-Street — by a hundred and nineteen. Three defeats in the final three games left New Zealand on eleven points with a net run rate of 0.175, which was enough to hold fourth place ahead of Pakistan, who finished level on points but behind on run rate.

Group stage, 2019	Result
Sri Lanka	Won by 10 wickets
Bangladesh	Won by 3 wickets
Afghanistan	Won by 7 wickets
India	No result
South Africa	Won by 4 wickets
West Indies	Won by 5 runs
Pakistan	Lost by 6 wickets
Australia	Lost by 86 runs
England	Lost by 119 runs

Qualifying fourth on run rate after three straight defeats is not the form of a finalist, and the New Zealand press said so at the time.

Old Trafford, spread over two days

The semi-final against India began on 9 July and did not finish that day. Rain took the players off with New Zealand 211 for five in the forty-seventh over, and the match resumed on the reserve day, New Zealand adding twenty-eight more to close on 239 for eight. It was a poor total by the standards of that tournament, on a slow surface, against a batting order that had lost only one group game.

India were three for three inside four overs. Matt Henry removed Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, Boult accounted for KL Rahul, and the tournament's outstanding batting line-up was suddenly playing for survival rather than a chase. Ravindra Jadeja and MS Dhoni then put on a partnership of a hundred and sixteen that took the game back to within one over of India, Jadeja making 77 from 59 balls before he was caught at deep midwicket.

With India needing 24 from ten deliveries, Dhoni turned a single into an attempt at two. Guptill, running in from deep, threw flat and hit the stumps at the keeper's end with Dhoni fractions short. India were bowled out for 221 in 49.3 overs; New Zealand won by eighteen. Henry, three for 37, took the match award. Williamson later called the run-out the point at which the game turned, and he was right — nothing after it seriously threatened New Zealand.

Two hundred and forty-one, and a slow Lord's pitch

The final was played on a used strip that offered almost nothing to drive at. New Zealand batted first after Williamson won the toss and made 241 for eight from their fifty overs, which was slower than any total in the tournament's semi-finals and, by the standards of the 2019 summer's flat surfaces, looked well short.

Henry Nicholls made the top score, 55 from 77 balls, and Latham 47 from 56. Williamson himself managed 30 from 53. Chris Woakes and Liam Plunkett took three wickets each; nobody got away, and nobody was dismissed cheaply enough to give England momentum either. Twenty-two of the fifty overs produced two runs or fewer. The scoring rate looked like a failure of ambition until England batted.

Eighty-six for four

England's reply went backwards early and stayed there. Boult and Henry took the openers, Ferguson and de Grandhomme squeezed the middle, and at eighty-six for four the tournament favourites were behind the required rate against bowling that gave them nothing straight and nothing full. New Zealand's attack that day was doing precisely what the country's seamers have always been taught to do, a tradition covered in the guide to New Zealand's swing bowling tradition.

Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler then batted together for the rest of the innings' shape. Buttler made 59 from 60 balls before he was caught, and Stokes finished on 84 not out from 98 — an innings almost entirely without boundaries in its first half, built on running.

Neesham, of all the bowlers, was the one who nearly ended it. He finished with three for 43. Ferguson also took three, for fifty.

Boult's heel, and the deflection

Two accidents inside the last ten balls decided the match.

The first came with England needing 22 from nine. Neesham bowled a slower ball wide of off stump, Stokes swung it towards long-on, and Boult ran round and took the catch cleanly above his head. Stepping back to steady himself, his left foot found the boundary cushion before he could relay the ball to Guptill inside the rope. Six runs instead of a wicket. Boult described the feeling of his shoe hitting the cushion afterwards and called it a silly mistake; the laws are unambiguous and the umpires had no discretion.

The second came in the final over, which Boult bowled. Stokes pushed a ball into the leg side and set off for two. Guptill's throw came in flat from deep midwicket, struck the back of Stokes's bat as he dived for the crease, and ran away to the boundary. Four overthrows plus the two run: six from the delivery. Whether it should have been five rather than six — the relay-throw law turns on whether the batters had crossed at the instant the fielder released the ball — was argued over for months, and the on-field decision was later widely accepted to have been wrong. It stood, because it had to.

The last two balls produced run-outs, Adil Rashid and Mark Wood both going for a second run they were never going to complete. England finished on 241 all out. Tied.

Fifteen off six, twice

Boult bowled England's Super Over. Stokes and Buttler took fifteen from it without being dismissed.

Jofra Archer bowled New Zealand's, and it started with a wide. Neesham hit the next ball for six over midwicket. That left New Zealand needing seven from four, then two from the last ball, with Guptill on strike. He clipped it into the leg side, ran one, turned for the second, and was run out at the far end by a relay from Jason Roy to Buttler. Fifteen apiece.

Nobody on the field appeared to know what happened next. The tiebreaker was in the playing conditions, and it favoured England: most boundaries hit across the main match and the Super Over combined, twenty-six to seventeen. Stokes took the player-of-the-match award.

What the rule change admitted

Within months the ICC removed boundary count-back from its knockout playing conditions. A tied Super Over in a knockout match now leads to further Super Overs until one side wins. The governing body did not put it in these terms, but scrapping a rule three months after it decided a World Cup final is a fairly plain statement about the rule.

For New Zealand the practical consequence was a second consecutive World Cup final lost, after Melbourne in 2015. The fuller fifty-over arc, including that earlier defeat and the 2000 knockout title in Nairobi, is set out in New Zealand's ODI cricket history, and the deeper background to the side's rise sits in the history of New Zealand cricket.

The side did not break up. Two years later, largely the same group beat India at Southampton to win the inaugural World Test Championship, which remains the only global men's title New Zealand holds. Williamson, Boult, Southee, Latham and Nicholls were all in both matches.

The tournament ledger

Williamson was named player of the tournament — 578 runs from nine innings at an average above eighty, with the two centuries against South Africa and the West Indies. He became the second New Zealand captain to take the award, after Martin Crowe in 1992, a tournament that changed the format's tactics and is covered in the Black Caps' fifty-over record.

The final itself set three firsts: the first tied World Cup final, the first Super Over in an ODI final, and the only World Cup decided on boundary count. The umpires were Kumar Dharmasena and Marais Erasmus.

Reading a Lord's pitch that plays as slowly as that one did is its own skill, and the way surfaces behave at home is a different problem again — see the guide to New Zealand pitch types and conditions. For the wider picture of how the men's side is organised and where its players come from, start at cricket in New Zealand.

Sources and method

Scores, bowling figures, dismissal details and the group-stage table come from the official ICC tournament records and the ball-by-ball scorecards for the semi-final at Old Trafford and the final at Lord's, cross-checked against contemporary match reports. The account of Boult's boundary-line catch draws on his own public description of the incident and on video of the delivery. The characterisation of the overthrow decision as an error reflects the widely reported post-match analysis of Law 19.8; the on-field call was final and the result stands as recorded.

Judgements in this page — that the total looked short until England batted, that the semi-final turned on the Dhoni run-out — are descriptive readings of the match, not computed measures. Where a figure could not be verified against a primary scorecard it has been left out.