Pakistan lose to New Zealand on final ball

Two teams struggling to find their best form produced one of the best matches of the tournament, settled off the last ball by all of a single run. Pakistan needed to make 11 from the excruciatingly tense final over. Salman Butt started it on strike, and though he failed to connect with two fresh-air swipes at the first and third of Ian Butler's deliveries, he crashed both the second and fourth through the off side for four. A sneaky single was taken from the fifth, non-striker Abdur Rehman coming within a whisker of being run out. He needed only two from the final ball, and would have got them too if only his swipe to leg had not picked out Martin Guptil at deep square. The defending champions then are all but out. Butt has propped up Pakistan throughout the tournament, and he played superbly again yesterday for his 67. When three wickets went down in the space of nine balls from Butler and Shane Bond early in Pakistan's innings it looked as though he would once again have to try and win the thing on his own. The game began to drift away, but Abdul Razzaq clattered 16 from Dan Vettori's final over, and added another six from Bond's final ball before being caught at mid-wicket. There was little about New Zealand's own innings to suggest they had done enough to win the match. They muddled 20 runs from their first two overs, only 11 of them off the bat. Pakistan's battery of spinners soon pulled back the slack of given up in that soft start. Abdur Rehamn removed Martin Guptil and Brendon McCullum in successive overs, and when Ross Taylor was caught behind in the next over Dan Vettori seemed to be standing alone on the deck as his ship went down. Vettori had never previously hit a single six in international Twenty20 so he seemed an unlikely saviour. He cracked two of them in his 38 here and Scott Styris added a skittish 21 but still 133 never felt like enough, and it very nearly wasn't.