Not happy: Steve Smith

TAKE the top eight teams in the world. Put them into two groups of four, in which a solitary defeat could be enough to ensure elimination. Schedule the tournament in 18 days, a salient contrast to the drawn-out World Cup. What could possibly go wrong?
The weather, it turns out.
The sight of Australia trudging off against Bangladesh at the Oval on Monday, four overs shy of turning their overwhelming dominance into enough cricket to constitute a game, was more than a little amusing to English eyes – but it was also a farce of the sort that deme...