Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh): Defending champions England have been in the midst of recurrent disasters in this World Cup and assistant coach Marcus Trescothick was unable to fathom what’s gone wrong with a team which has big hitters, the backing of being the trophy holders and a bowling department that rarely not fall short.
"The performances haven't been quite right. We've just not been matching up to the levels we expect. It's disappointing. But what can you do? We prepared the same, we've done things very similar to what you'd expect. Every practice we go through we're coming out the other side thinking we're in a good place and feeling quite right. It's just not quite worked then when we go into the games and got that right,” he said at the pre-match presser here where his squad meets India on Sunday.
England is second from the bottom on the points table and has recorded four losses in their campaign starting off with a loss against New Zealand. The team, in a bid to somehow assemble sanity has been changing combinations almost every match, something that has confounded the chaos in the ranks.
Over three losses on the trot, England changed seven players from their squad and each time the situation became only worse.
“When you haven't got players who haven't got the runs, they haven't got the form, they haven't got the backup of what they need to be doing. You can always question what we're trying to achieve. But the process and the conversations have always been the same and they won't change whether we're playing the first or the last game. You're just trying to read the situation and get it right on the day,” added Trescothick.
Despite all the confabulations and adaptability talks, the famed big scorers led by Jos Buttler have failed to lift the spirits of a star-studded team that has lost to Afghanistan, South Africa and Sri Lanka.
The aggression that they showed in winning the 2019 World Cup has not surfaced four years later as questions around England’s boredom with the 50-over white ball format have got louder and louder. Trescothick adamantly denied this saying “We love to play all formats of the game.”
When pressed further, he attributed it to the overly busy cricketing schedule of modern cricket, “You've got to plan in Test matches, T20s, 50s and what it is. We're always trying to get the balance right. Sometimes we do sometimes we don't. Some teams play more 50 overs than others and it just doesn't always match up so we're still trying to get it right and we're still focused on playing 50 over World Cups and 50 over cricket. It's just when it fits into the schedule,” he explained.
England came into the competition with a lot of hype, especially under Jos Buttler’s leadership but his captaincy has come under a cloud following the indecisions and the largescale changes that the team has been victim to. While India has been super hesitant in changing their team 11, England has surprisingly tried out all squad members in the last four games not giving the team a chance to concretise as a unit.
Despite seven changes in four games, they only ended up losing. The 229-run loss against South Africa broke whatever little mental strength to deal with the situation was left. Not just their batting power but also their strategies for dealing with different surfaces have been directionless, whether it was bowling first against Afghanistan’s spinners or against South Africa. Be it bowling or batting, the fire and the intent have been missing, something that Trescothick had no words to explain. All he could mutter was that this game would go a long way in giving some practice to the team returning for a Test series in January.
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