If Shahid Afridi always played like this, Garry Sobers might be nervously fretting over his place in the All-Time World XI © Associated Press

Farewell then, South Africa. An excellent campaign ended in failure – and within seconds, the choking accusations had begun. As sure as night follows day (but without even the intervening buffer of evening), as sure as headache follows headbutting a lamppost, as sure as, in my experience as a father, throwing food on the floor leads to the mother of your children saying, “Don’t throw food on the floor – you’re 34 now and supposed to be setting a good example,” as sure as all of these things, South Africa were accused of choking on the big occasion.

In all sports, when a team or player has acquired a reputation for choking, fairly or unfairly, any failure is habitually deemed a choke. South Africa’s track record of flunking big knock-out games goes before them, which is understandable, given the spectacular firework displays they have put on when exiting recent tournaments – all the more magnificent for the fact that the team habitually plays with studied focus and almost scientific precision. Seeing South Africa implode on the cricket field is thus akin to watching a normally sedate accountant turn feral and start barking at a filing cabinet after losing his favourite pencil.

However, yesterday, there was no choke. Twenty20 is barely long enough for a team to peruse the menu and order a tempting sandwich of whole sardines, peanuts and biro lids in floury seeded bread, let alone start eating and choking on it. South Africa did not field or bat especially well, but (a) Pakistan were good, (b) Shahid Afridi was exceptional, and, importantly, (c) Twenty20 is a capricious game and this tournament has proved that most teams can beat or lose to most others on a one-off basis.

Indeed, this very result, and the influence of Afridi, were both predicted in the latest Zaltzman Report audio show – listen to it here – along with my thoughts on the Super Eights, England’s Duckworth-Lewis difficulties and world exclusive news of the latest innovations in T20 strokeplay, including Dilshan’s as-yet-unseen Amateur Dentist Shot, in which he deliberately knocks out his own teeth. I hope you enjoy it. After predicting England to romp to a glorious victory over Netherlands in show 1, I am relieved that my reputation as cricket’s worst tipster has taken a dent.

South Africa had been impressive in their previous five games, but despite their victories, they had posted two low scores (including against India, the only other Asian team they faced, when they struggled to score off the spinners), they had not needed to chase a challenging score to win (batting second once previously, in reply to England’s honkingly useless 111), and, due to the success of their top order, their middle order had had little batting and, in Duminy’s case, it showed.

No choke then. They lost, and it happened to be a semi-final. And but for the incandescent Afridi, whose imperious all-round display made a total mockery of his overall career statistics, they might have won. If Afridi always played like this, Garry Sobers might be nervously fretting over his place in the All-Time World XI.

There cannot have been an easier Man-of-the-Match decision since the eight-year-old Andy Zaltzman walked off with the commemorative medallion and a cheque for 25 pence from a one-on-one game against his friend Donal, away from home, in Donal’s garden, with a tennis ball, a home-made bat, and a large tree as the stumps. 208 not out and 4 for 13 − what a display from the young Zaltzman, smashing 52 boundaries into the nearby flowerbed through the untended leg-side field, before taking the tennis ball and mercilessly exploiting the fact that his tearful, bored opponent had never previously played cricket.

(If I may digress a little, which, given that I am writing this under no supervision (the wife and kids are asleep), I may, there is an interesting comparison to be made with baseball. In cricket’s distant rogue third cousin, there are a similar number of ‘events’ as Twenty20 – an average of around 250-300 pitches per match, compared with up to 240 balls in T20, plus wides, no balls, and the possible effects of innumerate umpires. Results of individual matches are similarly unpredictable – a great major league baseball team will still lose more than a third of its matches, and a hopeless one will still win more than a third. It takes 162 regular-season games, plus up to 19 play-off matches, spanning seven months, for a team to win the MLB. The team winning the World Twenty20 will have played seven times. The brevity of the tournament has made it intense, unpredictable and exciting, but a strict meritocracy it is not. And there is a tendency to overanalyse the standard fluctuations of sport, and for some English commentators to ask momentous-sounding questions such as, “So, Graeme, where did it all go wrong?”, whilst desperately trying to suppress a snigger.)

Pakistan, for their part, stride onwards, one more Afridi masterclass away from completing a great, soul-warming story, and extending a giant metaphorical middle finger towards New Zealand’s inane mistaking of their own inability to hit the ball with the bats they had bought specifically for the purpose, for evidence of illegal tampering.

I expect Younis and his men to face Sri Lanka in the final. West Indies don’t have the bowlers to keep Sri Lanka quiet (unless they take early wickets), and, for all their batting depth, their struggles with Graeme Swann in recent months suggest they may also find Mendis and Murali a bridge too far and too confusing.

But, then again, if Gayle gets out of the right side of his bed ... if Sri Lanka lose early wickets and Dilshan successfully knocks his teeth out ... if Sarwan and Chanderpaul neutralise the mysteries of spin ... if stuff happens in a mildly unexpected manner as it always does in sport, and is then magnified by the shortness of the 20-over game ... who knows. Thank Zeus, and those who devised Twenty20, for the glorious unpredictability of unpredictability.

Here are the Official Confectionery Stall Conclusions From Days 1 to 5 Of the World Twenty20.

England will definitely win the Ashes

	The perfect final over except those four missed chances © Associated Press

Australia were humiliatingly dumped out of the tournament from a group containing only Sri Lanka (a nation that failed to win a Test match between 1877 and 1985) and West Indies (who had played no discernible cricket in the previous two months).

England, by the starkest of contrasts, heroically stormed into the last eight despite being lumbered in The Group Of Death with the Netherlands (a team good enough to beat England, the founders of cricket, in their own head-quarters) and Pakistan (undisputed 1992 World Cup winners, and a team good enough to beat the team good enough to beat England).

The only possible conclusion from this is that the Ashes are all but in Andrew Strauss’s back pocket already.

Arguably, I might be reading too much into it. But for those looking for omens of an England victory (in the absence of overwhelming scientific evidence pointing that way), in 2005 the Australians suffered a Twenty20 humiliation, losing to England by 100 runs, and went on to lose the Ashes.

Therefore, an England win is surely written in the stars. Admittedly, there are innumerable stars in the sky, and, if you squint hard enough, you can convince yourself almost anything is written in them. Last week, a friend of mine told me that the words “if you ride your bicycle fast enough into a disused quarry you won’t get hurt” were written in the stars. His heavily bandaged head and knees bear painful testament to his need to invest in a higher-quality telescope.

Stuart Broad is a natural-born history-maker

Not content with being ceremoniously plonked for six sixes by Yuvraj in the inaugural World Twenty20 in 2007, Broad became (it must be safe to assume) the first cricketer at any level of the game to miss four chances in a single over.

Three potential run-outs and a caught-and-bowled opportunity literally slipped through his fingers in a quite heroic display of near-missing in the last over of England’s defeat to the Dutch. That he managed to remain focused on his world record attempt whilst simultaneously bowling an almost perfect final over was still more impressive.

The momentousness of Broad’s achievement was somewhat lost in the frenzy of the match’s staggering climax and the hair-rending anguish / joyous celebrations / barely-suppressed sniggering that followed (delete one or more of the above according to whether you are from (a) England, (b) Netherlands, or (c) anywhere else in the cricketing world). Boys were expelled from my school for missing four chances in an entire season. To miss four in an over is the stuff of well-earned immortality.

On reflection, it was the quality of his bowling that gave him the four opportunities not to dismiss the batsmen. This was a two-tone jelly of top-level professionalism and village-green clangery, displaying international sport at its most compelling.

A lesser player would have been satisfied with his slice of history, wrapped it up in a hanky, and quietly faded into the background. Broad, however, responded with 3 for 17 against Pakistan. The lad clearly had tungsten-coated balls.

Momentum schmomentum

There is much talk of the importance of momentum in this competition (particularly in an effort to give meaning to the final three group matches, which have been rendered practically pointless due to the peculiar means of deciding who plays in which Super Eights group – if West Indies beat Sri Lanka and India beat Ireland in the final matches today, all four group winners will be in the same Super Eights section, thus rewarding teams for not showing off by winning their two group games).

However, it is the Confectionery Stall’s firm belief that the sultry temptress Momentum is one of cricket’s more deceitful goddesses.

Group B has proved this theory. England went in to their match against Netherlands surfing a wave of momentum after six consecutive wins in all forms of cricket. They fell off their surfboard. They not only lost, but also ticked more ineptitude boxes than Mike Gatting has had hot dinners, and took the kind of public battering usually reserved for an especially naughty politician or a particularly tasty-looking piece of haddock. They thus entered the game against Pakistan with no momentum. And won. Easily.

Pakistan, their already non-existent momentum shunted into reverse gear by this heavy defeat, then faced the Dutch, oozing momentum out of every pore after their landmark win against England. Pakistan duly clobbered the Dutch. On this evidence, teams should be looking to enter the Super Eights with the minimum possible momentum achievable without stalling completely. (Australia unluckily took this approach one step too far.)

Perhaps Netherlands had too much momentum, and overbalanced like an overfed rhino in a slalom skiing race. Or perhaps they had the wrong kind of momentum. Or pointed their momentum in the wrong direction.

Or perhaps it doesn’t necessarily matter that much in sport − and especially in an unpredictable sport like Twenty20, in which surprises are more likely and results more changeable than in longer forms of cricket, as they would be, for example, in one-set as opposed to five-set tennis matches, or one-egg egg-cooking competitions rather than a week-long best breakfast tournament.

This is, in my opinion, both a strength and a weakness of Twenty20, just as the shortness of the tournament is both an advantage and a drawback. Anyone could win it. But, by the same token, anyone could win it.

(As a footnote to this, it has been brought to my attention that in my previous blog I may not have analysed England’s alleged defeat to Netherlands with quite the rigour some would have expected. However, so excellent was the hosts’ performance in their second game that I have concluded that the opening match was a hoax. England, a well-funded professional side, did so many things wrong – silly selection, complacent underestimation of their opposition, batting like a bowl of porridge in the latter part of their innings, the list goes on and on and on and on – that the entire match must have been a media fabrication.)

I still quite like Twenty20

Before this tournament began, I quite liked Twenty20. I have watched much of this tournament. I still quite like Twenty20.

I’ve enjoyed some of the cricket, but have found some of it repetitive and formulaic. Watching Yuvraj and Gayle majestically demolish roofs of buildings is magnificent in any form of the game. Watching player after player haul his front leg out of the way and mow the ball over midwicket becomes decreasingly interesting. It has been good to see the stumping reclaim prominence in the scorebook, but I have started to hanker after slip fielders, textbook forward defensives, and lulls in the game.

If Twenty20 fever is sweeping the world, I think I might have developed immunity to it. I would love to contract a dose, as it seems inevitable that T20 will increasingly dominate global cricket. However, for all its several unarguable virtues, and the fervour and crowds it brings, it lacks too much of what I love most about cricket.

I am, however, more convinced than ever that, if the powers-that-claim-to-be in world cricket are genuinely serious about the primacy and importance of Test cricket, they must take action to preserve and nurture it, alongside its shorter, brasher, more accessible grandchild. Cricket is now competing against itself, and too much recent Test cricket has been featureless and predictable. If this is allowed to continue, the Twenty20 grandchild will pack its five-day granddad off to a nursing home, and probably forget to send him a birthday card.

Issue 2 of The Zaltzman Report World Twenty20 audio show will be available late on Thursday or early on Friday. Tune in (if tuning in is possible on a downloadable/streamable bit of audio) to hear me attempt to laugh off having lost my 10 pence bet on England to beat Netherlands at odds of 1-25.

The waiting is over. The World Twenty20 has begun. Cricketers from all corners of the globe have descended upon England, to test their skills against each other, and entertain the watching public.

It was a tremendous shame that the opening ceremony had to be cancelled due to the rain – I guess the world will never know now what spectacular displays would have unfolded on the famous Lord’s turf. Congratulations are due, however, to David Morgan and the Duke of Kent for bravely pressing ahead with their welcoming speeches despite the conditions, ensuring that the tournament had the official launch it so richly deserved.

Watching on my television, it was hard to tell whether the PA system conveyed their words audibly to the crowd at the ground – I do sincerely hope so, it would have been a shame for them to miss out. And how fortunate we are to live in an electronic age when microphones make such things possible.

Despite the weather, Lord’s was looking a picture as always, the new floodlights successfully blending in with the striking mixture of old and new architecture that has become the old ground’s signature. I particularly like the Grandstand. It is functional but very elegant. You had to wonder whether Thomas Lord could possibly have imagined the opening match of an international Twenty20 tournament taking place on his ground bearing his name just 222 years after the first Lord’s came into existence.

The famed drainage facilities at MCC head-quarters certainly proved their worth on such a wet day – a lesson to other grounds around the world. It would have been very disappointing if the opening game had had to be cancelled along with the opening ceremony. Fortunately, that did not happen. The ground staff must be complimented for their efforts to ensure the game went ahead.

Both teams looked very smart in their clean and freshly ironed kit. And it must have been a real thrill for the umpires, Stephen James Davis of Australia and Ellawalakankanamge Asoka Ranjit De Silva from Sri Lanka, to officiate on such a high-profile match.

On a global scale, the opening of the World Twenty20 might have been overshadowed by President Obama’s important speech in Cairo, and on a British scale, attention has been fixed on the apparent implosion of the Labour government. Nevertheless, it is exciting that, with the first game completed, the World Twenty20 is finally underway.

I am sure there will be some excellent matches over the next couple of weeks.

Exciting update: Andy's audio preview is here.

In less than three weeks’ time, we will know once and for all which country is currently the greatest nation in the world. Admittedly, this conclusion is dependent on whether your sole criterion for adjudicating the greatness of nations is their ability to win Twenty20 tournaments (and, also admittedly, this is not currently on the United Nations’ official list of ratified country-quality measures).

Nevertheless, the excitement is building ahead of what should be an exciting and enjoyable tournament, even for those who, like myself, are not particularly enthusiastic devotees of the short-form game. The tournament has the kind of intense schedule that enhances tension, rather than the elongated monotony of partial action that has scarred recent world cups. The grounds will be full, the teams have identity, most of the world’s best players will be playing, new heroes will carve their names into immortality with valuable 25-run cameos or match-turning spells of 1 for 16, and, in this melodramatic brand of cricket, upsets are almost guaranteed.

A case can be made for any one of the twelve teams to win – and I will make those cases in the first Zaltzman Report, my weekly World Twenty20 audio show (which should be available late on Thursday or early on Friday). Suffice it to write for now that Ireland will buoyed by the incontrovertible truth that the World Twenty20 has always previously been won by a team beginning with the letter I.

So, will the World Twenty20 capture the broader British public’s easily distractable imagination? Possibly. It feels like the cricketing summer is finally about to begin – those who complained that there should be no international cricket in May effectively got their wish, such was the irredeemable pointlessness of the West Indian ‘tour’.

At the very least, it will give the nation something to take its mind off whether members of parliament have submitted an expenses claim for a rogue £1.99 for a novelty Queen Mother pencil sharpener when it is well documented that they only ever write with their lucky Henry VIII commemorative ball-pen.

However, without live free-to-air television coverage, the home team will need to put up an uncharacteristically competent challenge, in defiance of recent history and an overall Twenty20 record that might charitably be described as “easily improvable”.

At most recent international tournaments, they have played with the confidence and know-how of a sausage in a crocodile pit. In all sporting competitions, there can be a danger of peaking too early – at least, since their 1992 World Cup near miss, England’s cricketers have become indisputable grand masters at avoiding this particular pitfall. Arguably, they have taken their devotion to not peaking too early some way beyond what is desirable or effective.

However, England should begin with confidence high after a succession of wins in all forms of the game. They concluded their preparations with another convincing win against West Indies on Wednesday, although, on their opponents’ current form, managing to contrive anything other than a convincing win against them would have taken a superhuman effort of targeted ineptitude.

Whether this confidence sustains them through the tougher tests in this tournament and the Ashes beyond remains to be seen – there must have been plenty of gladiators in ancient Roman times who discovered that having successfully swatted ten flies in a row counted for little when they came up against a peckish lion.

England will again have to cope without Flintoff, and whilst they would be significantly better with him, he has not played enough of late for them actually to miss him. From an Ashes perspective, his absence is unquestionably good news for England fans, as his current injury significantly reduces the amount of cricket in which he can injure himself before the Test series begins.

On a personal note, the last time there was an international tournament on these shores – the mendaciously-named ICC Champions Trophy of 2004 – England accidentally reached the final, and I deliberately got married on the middle Saturday of the tournament.

The former is marginally more likely to recur than the latter. If England’s success is to be repeated, they will need to overcome the joint force of their recent record and relative lack of experience at this form of the game. If my personal success is to be repeated, I will have to (a) work fast and with devastatingly alluring charm; (b) break the law; and (c) thoroughly annoy my current wife of nearly 5 years. Since I have no desire to do either (b) or (c), my historic inability to do (a) is rendered thankfully irrelevant.

The Official Confectionery Stall Tournament Predicted Winner: India. Or Scotland.

Too close to call. Probably Scotland though. The stormy exit of John Blain is exactly the kind of ruction that often pulls squads together and propels them towards their ultimate triumph before being made into a blockbusting Hollywood movie with some contrived love interest – probably Reece Witherspoon as a female umpire, who after triggering the Scottish captain (Keanu Reeves as Gavin Hamilton) with a terrible lbw decision in a group-stage match ends up giving the same player not out bowled off the penultimate ball of the final before Reeves/Hamilton belts a tournament-winning walk-off home-run off the final pitch, and the happy couple lift the trophy together on the Lord’s balcony before flying off in a helicopter to a secret meeting at ICC headquarters in Los Angeles. Also starring Will Smith as ex-ICC chief Malcolm Speed, and Al Pacino as Billy Bowden. Based on a true story.

Look out for the regular Confectionery Stall postings during the tournament (hopefully daily, although some days may last 48 hours), and the weekly Zaltzman report audio bulletin. Here's the first one