With India’s last match against Australia in Sydney washed out, the last league match of the tri-series, between India and England is a straight knock-out game before the final. And England captain, Eoin Morgan feels it would be a crucial game for his team going into the World Cup to give them a boost of confidence.
“I think it is important to win this game given the lack of success we’ve had before this tour,” Morgan said. “We’ve built a confidence in our preparation, in the game in Brisbane and in performances leading into the start of this series. So as momentum and confidence goes I think it’s quite a big game.”
England will take heart from the fact that they defeated India in their Brisbane tie quite comprehensively. Morgan said that win could be the catalyst to England’s improved ODI performance in the future.
“The guys are in high spirits. Yes, we did take a lot of confidence from that game and I think that performance has been a long time coming,” he said. “We’ve put in a lot of work over the last year or so with very little reward.
“An individual performance like Steven put in was brilliant, since then Ian Bell has put out a fantastic performance. So things are starting to come together and I think a win tomorrow would give us huge confidence and build momentum for us.”
India have been in Australia since three months now and the core of the Test and ODI team has remained the same. However, Morgan refuted any claims that the opposition might be tired and it would give them an advantage.
“I don’t sense that at all (that India are tired). I think India are a very dangerous side. Right down their line-up they do have match-winners, experience and they’ve some young, exciting players. So we won’t take them for granted.
“The opportunity to play in a final against Australia on Sunday is huge. But we’ll have to play some high-quality cricket to get past India first,” he said.
While speaking of the different conditions at all the Australian venues, Morgan said over the next couple of months in the World Cup, it will be important to take the pitch and conditions out of equation and react to the ball and situation ahead of them.
“You can only read so much into the pitch before the game,” he said. “The huge challenge for us over the next few months is going to be breaking everything down to its simplest form and taking each ball as it comes, playing the situation in front of you and doing all you can to either win that situation or win that ball-by-ball fight. Given we’ll play at different grounds throughout these next few months, that’s going to be crucial.”
Like MS Dhoni said ahead of India’s Sydney ODI, Morgan too believes that in a tournament like the World Cup using the breaks to get mentally ready is more crucial than spending hours in the nets.
“I think the guys are just keen to get going. There will be stages like this throughout the World Cup that we need to get ourselves ready for and the emphasis is going to be on match-day, being as mentally and physically fit as we can to take on whoever it is.
“The physical side of it you can take separately but having too much cricket on your mind can sometimes create an issue where you’re going around in circles or thinking about something too much.
“That suits a couple of our players but it doesn’t suit many. The less the guys think about it the better. The more used to time off and downtime we can get going into the World Cup I think will be really useful,” he said.
By: BCCI
