world cup five-fer: day 41

Jayawardene - perfectly paced his innings.

By Nick Miller

1. Umpiring
Cricket umpires are among the most respected officials in sport, largely because they usually get things right.

However, today Rudi Koertzen and Simon Taufel had what can only be described as stinkers.

New Zealand had a couple of very, very decent lbw shouts turned down early on, but were awarded two that simply weren't out. By far the worst was Chamara Silva, who got the thickest of inside edges on a delivery from Bond. What makes the decision even worse, if such a thing is possible, was that it wasn't even heading for the stumps when Silva edged it.

Also, Jacob Oram dismissed Dilshan with another ropey lbw call, with the ball hitting his back leg when it was heading way past leg stump.

Koertzen and Taufel are two of the best umpires in world cricket, so we can perhaps forgive them for this off day. Just a shame it came on such an important one.

2. Mahela Jayawardene
He has been in great touch throughout the World Cup, but he excelled himself against New Zealand.

It was the most perfectly paced innings in this tournament. He started off extremely carefully - so carefully in fact, that he was going at less than a run every two balls for the first half of his knock.

However, when he needed to kick on he did so with a vengeance, scoring his last 60 runs from just 27 balls, with brilliant attacking shots all around the wicket.

3. Death bowling
As good as Sri Lanka were towards the end of their innings, they were helped along the way by some pretty shambolic bowling.

Shane Bond looked poor throughout the innings, so it was perhaps a rare poor decision from Stephen Fleming to hand him the ball for the 48th and 50th overs. Those two went for 24 runs, a number of them from rank long hops and full tosses.

Bond was not alone. After an impressive initial spell, James Franklin was brought back for the 47th over, only to disappear for 13 with a series of wides and the sort of length balls that are suicide at that stage of an innings.

4. Strength in depth?
One of New Zealand's big strengths, and the reason that many tipped them as dark horses before this World Cup, is their batting depth.

With the likes of Craig McMillan and Brendon McCullum batting in the lower middle order, they can often recover from top-order failings to post decent totals, but against Sri Lanka they suffered an England-esque collapse.

From 105-2, they lost five wickets for 11 runs and from there had no chance of reaching the 290 they needed.

A couple of plucky partnerships for wickets nine and ten brought them closer to their target than the top order performance merited, but that collapse was the key.

5. Cheeky Murali
For all his brilliance, Muttiah Muralitharan has occasionally been known to go against the 'spirit of game'.

Excessive appealing is usually his main crime, but today he took an extremely dicey caught and bowled to get rid of Jacob Oram.

The ball appeared to fall from his grasp as he dived forward, and just catch the ground before he snatched it up and claimed the catch.

Maybe this was another poor decision from the officials, although Oram seemed to walk once Murali claimed it. Nonetheless Murali's insistance that it was a doubt-free, clean catch was at best cheeky, at worst just plain cheating.