New Zealand laid a truly historic beating on England at the Cricket World Cup

If you’re an American, you’re probably not following the Cricket World Cup. America totally sucks at cricket, ESPN’s charging $99 to watch the tournament and it’s being held in Australia and New Zealand. This means you probably missed Friday’s match, one of the all-time greatest beatdowns in top-level professional sports.

A quick rules rundown: The Cricket World Cup uses a match type called ‘One Day International’, in which each team bats once. You bat until all of your batters are out, it’s impossible for one team to catch another, or you’ve completed 50 ‘overs’. An over is six pitches.

In Friday’s match against co-hosts New Zealand, England batted first and was dismissed all out after just 33 overs, plus two balls in the 34th. That was the fastest any team had been dismissed so far in the tournament. Their score of 123 runs is the lowest that anyone has posted. For reference, the highest score posted in the tournament so far is 342 and the average is 249.6, including the two instances in which New Zealand bowled first, dismissed their opponents for low scores, then matched their scores to end the match well before reaching their maximum of 50 overs. The lowest score England posted in the 2011 World Cup was a 171, which actually came in a win. Their lowest score in a loss was 229.

Of England’s nine dismissed batsman, seven were mowed down by Tim Southee. Those seven dismissals came in nine overs, during which he allowed just 33 runs. It was the 3rd best statistical bowling performance of all time in the World Cup.

Once England were all out for 123, it was very clear that they were going to lose. There was no realistic path to winning the match without a true meltdown from New Zealand’s batters. England’s bowlers, apparently well aware of this, didn’t exactly put their best foot forward.

Stuart Broad gave up 18 runs to New Zealand in the second over, and it only got worse from there. Steven Finn bowled the fourth and sixth overs, allowing 49 runs and dismissing no batsmen. Brendon McCullum scored 44 of those runs. This is a lot like when Fernando Tatis hit two grand slams in one inning off Chan Ho Park in 1999, except possibly even more ridiculous. McCullum got to 50 runs off 18 balls, breaking his own record for the fastest 50 in World Cup history.

In the eighth over of New Zealand’s innings, England had their Brazil vs. Germany in the FIFA World Cup moment, as Chris Woakes managed to get McCullum out for a bit of a consolation dismissal. England got another batsman out after the tea break too (yes, cricket has tea breaks). It only delayed the inevitable until the 13th over -- fittingly, the match ended when Broad bowled wide, Joseph Butler couldn’t stop it and it rolled all the way to the boundary to gift New Zealand five runs, giving them the win 125-2 out to 123 all out.

The match ended in 3 hours and 15 minutes of play, or four real hours including the mandated break. It’s not uncommon for games to go eight hours, with both teams batting for all 50 overs. This match didn’t even have 50 total overs, between the two teams combined. Former England cricket captain Nasser Hussain said on Sky Sports that this was the most decisive margin of victory he’d ever seen at this level of the game.

This kind of thing happens to really bad teams sometimes, but England aren’t one of them. They were the top-ranked ODI team by the ICC when the draw was made for the World Cup and entered the tournament ranked No. 6, one place behind New Zealand. England have been runners-up in the World Cup three times, while New Zealand have never advanced to the final.

Because of their hosting the tournament and England’s loss in their first match to the other co-hosts, Australia, New Zealand were certainly slight favorites coming into this match, but the magnitude of the savage beating New Zealand laid on England was more or less unthinkable. The English specialize in talking themselves into the most disastrous losses possible for their sports teams, and even the most cynical of England fans wouldn’t have come up with this.