Sri Lanka were not likely to chase down 282 in 38 overs; 240 was the sort of target that offered both the teams an even chase. Sri Lanka's pressure index (PI) therefore opened at 139.
The final wasn't completely one-sided; there was a phase between overs 13-23 when Sanath Jayasuriya and Kumar Sangakkara certainly had Ricky Ponting and his boys worried. During this phase the PI hovered around 120.
Things got harder when Sangakkara left, but Jayasuriya and Mahela Jayawardene still kept the PI around 125.
Then things got murky, it looked like rain and Sri Lanka thought they had to accelerate quickly to catch up with the D/L par score (with a PI above 120, it was easy to deduce that S/L were behind the D/L par score; recall that the PI is based on resource tables not dissimilar to the D/L table).
That's when they lost the plot because a lot of wickets fell between the 4's and 6's hit in the run scramble. Sri Lanka were eventually defeated by a combination of cricketing and non-cricketing variables.
In the process, the ICC umpires and officials too were completely defeated.
Once both teams complete 20 overs (I've never understood why the minimum was reduced from 25 to 20, even for a World Cup), there has to be a verdict that very day!
It was very surprising that umpire Aleem Dar didn't know this. But I sometimes wonder if Dar even knows his lbw rule well; Rahul Dravid didn't look lbw in that match against Bangladesh.
Sunil T and Sunil Patil of Cranes Software created this pressure map based on the details retrieved from the Rediff scorer
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