Ten years and 10 days after suffering perhaps their most chastening one-day defeat of all – a World Cup evisceration by New Zealand that exposed their archaic tactics – England’s ODI team crashed to a new nadir.
True, this defeat in Karachi was nothing like as quick as that afternoon in Wellington. Then, England lost with 226 balls of the scheduled match remaining; here, there were 70 scheduled deliveries left. The modest crowd, too, were far more forgiving than the locals in New Zealand. And yet England’s seven-wicket loss to South Africa embodied – almost as much as that eight-wicket crushing by New Zealand – the desolate state of their ODI side.