Having won the 50-over World Cup earlier this year, England captain Eoin Morgan said they are focusing on the World T20 now. T20 World Cup is scheduled to be played in Australia later next year.
“Our main focus over the last four years has been the 50-over cricket. T20 cricket has been seen as an opportunity to get young guys involved and get experience under their belt and use that as a ground for experimentation,” Morgan told FirstPost. “However, over the next 12 months, that will be flipped, so we might have to save our experimentation for 50-over cricket, and T20s will become my most pressing concern.”
Post the 2015 World Cup, Morgan had a detail discussion with others about their failure. However, that helped them to win this year’s World Cup.
“It was a conversation between myself, Trevor and Andrew Strauss about what the formula looked like for our approach for the next four years leading to 2019. It basically started with the direction from Andrew Strauss having a blank sheet of paper and actually rewriting the way we wanted to play and recognising the fact that we wanted to do things differently. That’s played a huge role in changing not only the way we want to play but also the personnel that we selected to play in that way,” he added.
Morgan added that it was not tough to explain the strategy and getting the players to accept the change in playing style as they enjoyed playing aggressive cricket.
Read here: Mithali Raj Thinks Women’s Cricket Needs More Exposure
“It was a very enjoyable challenge and the boys really enjoyed playing in an aggressive manner. So it wasn’t hugely challenging to get players to buy into it. The guys naturally played with an aggressive mindset. The first two years of the four-year cycle were about working out what worked and knowing our limits, and also when to push them. So that was an interesting phase, the guys had a lot of fun playing around with that plan particularly with the batting. Then, in the next two years, particularly after the Champions Trophy in 2017, it was a matter of building on what we felt we needed to get better in the lead up to the 2019 World Cup,” Eoin Morgan said.
One of the other reasons for England’s success was Jofra Archer, who did a brilliant job for his side in the World Cup and finished the tournament as the highest wicket-taker.
“Jofra is an extremely rare talent. He can bowl during any phase of the game. The pace with which he bowls and the skill level is exciting to watch. The most appealing thing about Jofra and the surprising thing in may ways is that he continues to get better. A lot of guys in international cricket, when they come in, they take some time to find their feet and then go from there. Jofra has taken everything in his stride, and actually dominated, which is really rare,” he concluded.
