Pakistan didn’t stand a chance. It wasn't a game of cricket so much as a stress test for a legacy system that finally, predictably, blue-screened under the pressure. When Harry Brook finished his century, he didn’t just walk off the pitch; he exited the simulation with the kind of casual indifference usually reserved for closing a browser tab you’re done with.

England is through to the semi-finals. But that’s the headline for the people who still believe sports are about "heart" or "grit." If you’ve been paying attention to the way the ECB has been retooling its roster like a Silicon Valley firm poaching engineers from a failing startup, you know heart has nothing to do with it. This was about optimization. It was about Brook, a 25-year-old human algorithm, finding the shortest path between a delivery and the boundary rope. Over and over again.

The stats tell one story, but the vibe told another. Pakistan’s bowling attack, once the envy of the circuit, looked like hardware trying to run software it wasn't built for. Shaheen Afridi’s pace was there, sure, but the logic was flawed. Brook didn't just hit him; he decompiled him. He waited for the predictable patterns—the yorker, the slower ball, the desperate short delivery—and he countered them with a cold, mechanical efficiency.

It’s getting harder to enjoy this, isn't it?

We’re told that T20 is the peak of the sport’s evolution, a high-octane product designed for the TikTok attention span. But watching Brook dismantle a world-class attack feels less like a drama and more like a data entry job. He’s too good. He’s a patch update that fixed all the bugs in the English batting order. The friction is gone. The uncertainty that makes sports actually interesting has been ironed out by a decade of biomechanical analysis and the relentless pursuit of "strike rate" as the only metric that matters.

The cost of this perfection is the game's soul, though nobody in the hospitality suites seems to care. Tickets for this match were going for $150 a pop, a steep price to pay to watch a massacre. For that kind of money, you’d hope for a contest. Instead, the crowd got a live demonstration of a monopoly in action. England has the best tech, the best data, and now, the best middle-order asset in the business. They’ve turned winning into a repeatable process, a SaaS model for international trophies.

Pakistan, meanwhile, looks like a company that forgot to innovate. Their tactics feel analog in a digital age. They still rely on "momentum," that nebulous, unquantifiable ghost that Brook’s generation doesn’t even believe in. When Brook hit his hundred, the silence in the Pakistan dugout wasn't just disappointment. It was the realization that they were playing a different game entirely. They’re still trying to write poetry while England is just running a script.

Let’s talk about Brook for a second. He doesn't have the flair of the old-school greats. He doesn't have the arrogance. He just has a very high frame rate. He sees the ball earlier, reacts faster, and executes with a terrifying lack of emotion. It’s effective. It’s brilliant. It’s also deeply boring if you’re looking for a narrative. He’s the person at the party who explains exactly how the magic trick works while the magician is still on stage.

Now England heads into the semi-finals as the heavy favorites, a status they wear with the smugness of a tech giant facing an antitrust lawsuit it knows it’s already bought its way out of. They’ve got the momentum, the metrics, and the most expensive coaching staff money can buy. The rest of the tournament feels like a formality, a series of scheduled meetings before the inevitable IPO of another trophy.

If you’re a purist, you’re probably waiting for the "magic" to return. You’re waiting for an underdog to find a loophole in England’s code. But looking at Brook’s wagon wheel from today, it’s clear the loopholes have been closed. The system is working perfectly. The product is polished. The outcome is predictable.

What happens to a sport when the winners have finally figured out how to stop losing?