England’s limited-overs skipper, Eoin Morgan reckons that they have an “unbelievably talented” pool of limited-overs cricketers as they now preparing for their campaign to reach the next World Cup against Ireland on Thursday. The three-match ODI series at Southampton’s Ageas Bowl launches the new World Cup Super League, which will determine qualification for the 2023 ODI World Cup in India.
England’s Test matches and limited-overs games are overlapping as a season cut short by the coronavirus outbreak and they are maintaining two separate squads, meaning a clutch of World Cup winners including Joe Root and Ben Stokes will not be playing teh ODIs against Ireland.
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But Morgan said he had more talented players at his disposal than he had ever seen before. He said, “There’s such a big pool of players that are unbelievably talented. We don’t know if they will succeed in international cricket but you would be comfortable selecting them in a squad if you needed them at any stage.”
The English skipper pointed to an abundance of top-order batsmen but said they need to make their middle-order and lower order stronger. Morgan said England’s first World Cup triumph had increased the expectation form the team but it has also boosted their confidence.
As per the quotes in NDTV, Eoin Morgan explained, “Winning last year has given our guys a huge amount of confidence in the process, strategy, and planning we went through over a four-year period. So it allows us to go into every World Cup with that strategy and forward-thinking and contributing along the way the whole time and trying to continually get better.”
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He further elaborated, “Seeing the finished product last year was an eye-opener for everybody that hadn’t won a World Cup but also it creates a level of expectation everywhere we go and that’s one that sits well with some of our guys but for a lot of our guys they haven’t experienced that so it’s important to recognize what’s expected of us moving forward because we want to win more trophies.”
In the Super League format, the 13 teams will be playing four home and four away three-match series each. The Ireland series will be played under tight bio-secure rules. The second and third matches are scheduled to be played on August 1 and 4, also in Southampton.
