Heh, I'm just watching the end of it now - they're interviewing Symonds and he's talking about that exact point: "teams that leave out players can lose momentum. It's not the way we would have done it".
Interesting to see that you guys still haven't faced Malinga. I still think he
could be the secret weapon - equally, he could get hammered - but when the Aussies are favourites anyway, the Lankans might as well go for the risky play and hope it comes off.
This assumes that the Lankans make the final of course. The Aus-NZ match could be interesting - both teams will finally be playing their first choice team, so I'm sure they'll want psychological advantage.
I will take a moment here to point out that (baring an English upset tomorrow) I picked the four semi-finalists before we even started
. Unfortunately, I can't see anyone even giving the Aussies a close game, at the moment. Hopefully NZ can, but I don't think Australia's poor performances earlier this season will be reflected when it comes down to the crunch.
Also disappointing is the way that NZ basically had no challenges at all on their way to the semis - we got there by playing England, Scotland, Canada, West Indies, Ireland and Bangladesh. We'd qualified before we played even a single team in the top half of the one day rankings. It was a bit unfortunate really, I certainly lost a bit of interest in the Cup when it became obvious that we wouldn't play a really important game for about three weeks.