It’s raining heavily in the Pretoria/Tshwane region on Sunday morning, and the start of play on the final day of the round-robin leg of the 2005 Women’s Cricket World Cup has been delayed. The chances of any play today are not good and there is no reserve day. If there is no play today, all teams will receive an extra three competition points, and the semi-finals will be between Australia and England on Tuesday, and between India and New Zealand on Thursday.
Update 2pm: All four games have been abandoned. Australia finishes 1st on the table and will play England in the first semi-final on Tuesday. India finishes 2nd on the table and will play New Zealand on Thursday. Reserve days have been set aside for the semi-finals, and these will be Wednesday and Friday respectively.
South Africa finished in 7th place, and Sri Lanka 6th. It was previously reported that Sri Lanka had missed out on the bonus point in their win over South Africa on Friday and had taken 5 points to 1. In fact they achieved the bonus point threshold by just one run, and took 6 points to 0, thus placing them one point ahead of South Africa on the ladder. This turned out to be a crucial difference as it means that Sri Lanka has avoided relegation to the qualification tournament for the next Women’s World Cup.
(Note: This article was originally written for the Cricketwoman website in 2005. It may contain links to Cricketarchive which have long since ceased to exist. Cricketwoman was a partner website of Cricketarchive at the time of the 2005 Womens World Cup. – RE, 2017-07-21)