That six-wicket defeat made no odds to the Super Eight, with the pre-seeded pools now awkwardly featuring all the group winners on one side of the draw and all the runners-up on the other. But it was conceivably an untimely bump back to earth, just in time for Sri Lanka’s reunion with a familiar set of foes. England won five matches out of six on their white-ball warm-up tour of the country last month, including three out of three in the T20I leg.

None of these wins were emphatic, but each of them was sealed by subtly different means – Adil Rashid’s spin strangle in game 1, Tom Banton’s middle-order awakening in game 2, Sam Curran’s guts and glory on a tricky turning deck in game 3, in which England’s back-up tweakers, Will Jacks and Jacob Bethell applied the coup de grace.

The net effect was to give the impression of a well-rounded England team, one that was ready to march into the main event with form to fall back on and faith in their myriad methods. And while that might still be the case in an eminently surmountable Group 2 which also features the known unknowns of New Zealand and Pakistan, the sheer terror of those near-misses against Nepal and Italy cannot be easily forgotten. Nor the disturbing passivity of their old-school trouncing in Mumbai by West Indies.

The stage is therefore set for Sri Lanka to pounce on the big occasion, as they have often done in the recent past, most notably with their wins at the 2019 and 2023 ODI World Cups, when their brace of victories went against the grain of their one-sided bilateral records.

Sri Lanka’s batting has broadly fired across the group stages, with Nissanka leading the line and Kusal Mendis contributing a trio of fifties in four matches, but agonisingly they’ll have to take the stage without the raw pace of Matheesha Pathirana, whose slingy action had England’s top order in all sorts of bother throughout their bilateral engagements. He lasted just four balls of the Australia game before succumbing to a calf strain, and has been replaced by Dilshan Madushanka.

Pathum Nissanka joined a curiously niche club when he smoked Australia to the brink of elimination last week. Only Chris Gayle before him had managed a T20 World Cup hundred, in addition to an ODI double-hundred and a century in all three formats – and if he’s got some way to go to match Gayle’s twin Test 300s, then a career-best 187 in his last series against Bangladesh suggests he’s tracking in the right direction. England did not see the best of him in the bilateral series just gone, but they’ll remember it alright. At The Oval in 2024, he blazed a superb fourth-innings 127 not out from 124 balls to swipe the third Test from under his opponents’ noses. At a time when England’s own batting lacks a touch of bravado, Nissanka is perfectly placed to steal a march once again.

Adil Rashid has been an unlikely barometer of England’s struggles. On his day, he remains absolutely integral to his team’s hopes of adding to the silverware that he has been instrumental in collecting over the course of the past decade. In England’s loss to West Indies, he did not concede a single boundary in serving up figures of 2 for 16 in four overs, while a combined haul of 5 for 69 in 12 in Pallekele last month suggests he will be right back on the mark on his return to a happy hunting ground. In between whiles, however, he has been treated with rare disdain by a succession of Associate batters, serving up combined figures of 4 for 121 in 11 overs, including a brutal outing of 3-0-42-0 against Nepal. Part of that might come down to a lack of inhibition from a succession of unfancied opponents who had licence to take him on. But with Brook’s tournament stratergy lean8ng so heavily on spin,  England cannot afford many more bad days from their veteran. They aren’t programmed to cope when he goes missing.