Captain Harry Brook hit a superb 100 as England recovered from a poor start to their innings to chase down 166 and beat Pakistan to seal a place in the last four of the T20 World Cup.
England were reeling at 17-2 and 35-3 as Phil Salt, Jacob Bethell and Jos Buttler coughed up cheap wickets but Brook steadied the ship before hitting some trademark blows to accelerate to victory.
He fell shortly after bringing up his first T20 hundred in Pallekele in just 50 balls and it was left to Jofra Archer to hit the winning runs in the last over.
South Africa or West Indies look England’s most likely semi-final opponents. India are still technically in the running but are in trouble after their heavy defeat to South Africa and need big wins with a good run rate to squeeze through.
“I’m very happy with the way we played there,” said Brook.
“It’s just nice to get through to the semi-finals now, but we still have one more game against New Zealand so we focus on that before the bigger prize at the other side.
“There’s obviously areas that we still want to improve on. You can never quite get perfection but we are always striving for it.”
Liam Dawson had earlier taken three for 24, with Archer and Jamie Overton claiming a couple of wickets each, to restrict Pakistan to 164 for nine, with Sahibzada Farhan making 63, before Shaheen Shah Afridi gave England a fright with three powerplay wickets.
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