sport news T20 World Cup: England have every right to be confident ahead of semi-final ...

England will never tire of reaching the business end of World Cups, but their presence in Wednesday's T20 semi-final against New Zealand in Abu Dhabi has taken no one by surprise.

Back in March 2016, when these two sides met at the same stage of the tournament on a sultry night in Delhi, England won at a canter, before being famously upended by Carlos Brathwaite at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens.

But if there was a sense of chaotic fun about their progress then, their passage to the last four now has felt like nothing more than an inevitable part of the white-ball revolution set in motion six years ago by Eoin Morgan.

Had he been offered another game against New Zealand to give his side a chance of becoming the first to simultaneously hold the 50-over and T20 World Cups, England’s captain would have accepted without a second thought. But injuries, both before and during this World Cup, have made the task trickier than envisaged.

England knew when they arrived in the Gulf that they would have to create history without Jofra Archer and Ben Stokes, two of their heroes from the 2019 one-day final against the New Zealanders at Lord’s. Sam Curran, too, had picked up a stress fracture of the back.

Nine days ago in Sharjah, fast bowler Tymal Mills limped off mid-over against Sri Lanka with a thigh strain. Five days later at the same venue, a tearful Jason Roy tore a calf during the team’s lone Super 12 defeat by South Africa.

A third successive limited-overs final, then, would say plenty not just about the white-ball talent at Morgan’s disposal, but about its depth.

‘We had a glimpse of that during our summer, when we had to replace 15 players, and they ended up beating Pakistan’s strongest ODI team 3-0,’ he said.

‘But I think if we could achieve something like that here… getting to the final would be a hell of an achievement.’ It was New Zealand’s gung-ho spirit under Brendon McCullum, of course, that helped persuade Morgan to change tack after the disastrous 2015 World Cup.

Since then, the two sides have barely stopped bumping into each other, with England regularly emerging on top.

After that 2016 semi-final in Delhi, they beat New Zealand in the 2017 Champions Trophy in Cardiff, then twice at the 2019 World Cup. Throw in a pair of bilateral 3-2 one-day wins both home (in 2015) and away (in 2017-18), plus a T20 victory by the same margin in 2019-20, and England have every right to feel quietly confident.