Dutch make England sweat for opening win England laboured to a thrilling six-wicket victory completed with eight balls to spare over the Netherlands in a Group B match to avert what would have been the first upset of the World Cup.
The Netherlands batsmen, especially the South Africa-born Ryan ten Doeschate (119), thrived on England's shoddy bowling and sloppy fielding to power the team to 292-6, a target that seemed quite a test for their opponents' tweaked batting order.
At least England could console themselves with the third highest successful run chase at a World Cup after the Dutch posted the best score by an associate member against a test-playing nation.
Skipper Andrew Strauss was less than impressed, however. "We got a lot of things wrong with our bowling and we let them off the hook three or four times in the field as well. So it was a very poor first 50 overs," he said.
"We've got take that on the chin, learn from it very quickly because we can't afford to do that too often. We were very disappointed with ourselves on the field and thankfully the batters got us out of jail.
"We knew if we kept wickets in hand, we'd have a good chance of chasing it down. It was a little bit nervy there at the end, maybe a little more nervy than we would have liked."
England's chase got off to a resounding start with Strauss (88) and Kevin Pietersen (39) providing a rollicking 105-run stand before they lost four wickets to find themselves in a spot of bother.
Paul Collingwood's (30) experience and Ravi Bopara's (30) improvisation came in handy as England survived some torrid times before completing the tricky chase in the penultimate over.
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