England embraced their inexperience in India to reach the final of the World T20 last year, but they’ll need a subtle shift of approach in the forthcoming ODIs
Arun Venugopal in Pune14-Jan-2017When England arrived in India for the World T20 last year, 10 of their 15 players had no experience of playing senior cricket in the country. To Eoin Morgan, the England captain, the “naïvety with a huge amount of talent” wasn’t a bad thing. He believed – and rightly so in hindsight after reaching the final in a high-powered campaign – that his players were better off not being scarred by previous defeats in India.A year on, England have arrived in India for three ODIs and as many T20Is, minus the naïvety but with the talent intact. Morgan said his team would this time draw confidence from the familiarity of the terrain – a few players were with the Test squad, and Jos Buttler partook of the IPL last year – and feed off the good memories from the World T20.”Coming to that tournament [World T20] in particular, this group of players had never played cricket in India,” Morgan said at a press conference on the eve of the first ODI. “I think there were four of us who’d toured here before and, having toured here and done well, we’ ve overcome the mental battle [particularly when] some pitches just don’t turn and some do.”You’ve to be responsive and stay in the moment as long as you can, and react as best you can to those circumstances. I think it worked for us in that tournament, and hopefully it’ll work for us throughout this series.”Morgan also drew inspiration from South Africa’s and New Zealand’s performances in the ODI series against India, and said that beating India wasn’t an impossible task.”Recently, South Africa turned India over, New Zealand pushed them close,” he said. “It’s nice to be about to come to a country where there is a huge hype and expectation on the series, not necessarily on us, but even if it was on us, the emphasis has always been internally as a side, and I’m trying to get them all set. One of the biggest challenges here is adapting to conditions.”When asked how the players who were part of the Test squad that suffered a 4-0 thrashing approached the series, Morgan pointed to the fundamental reason for playing the game – the love of it.”Regardless of how they’ve done [in Tests], the guys really look forward to how they play the 50-over and T20 game,” he said. “It’s a nice way to play cricket, regardless of whether you win, lose or draw – with that attitude you had as a kid. You wake up on the weekend and all you wanted to do all day was play cricket. You’d look out the window and hope the sun was shining. So, that kind of attitude is very important.”England’s attitude to white-ball cricket in the last two years, though, has been characterised by high-decibel ball-striking, led by the likes of Joe Root and Buttler. Since their first-round exit in the 2015 World Cup, England have won five of their seven ODI series, with their batsmen at the forefront. They have had six 350-scores, including the highest-ever total in ODI cricket at Trent Bridge. England also have the highest run-rate among all teams in that time: 6.25.Unlike what Brendon McCullum did with his New Zealand side, however, Morgan was careful not to qualify his team as a “fearless unit”. This team instead, according to Morgan, wanted to stay true to its character, and was comfortable doing its own thing.”The group of players that we have are very outgoing, very expansive and very explosive, and do what they say they’re going to do,” he said. “They can stick to their natural game, which is quite an aggressive game. Trying to be somebody else, or trying to be a different team, doesn’t work for us.”England’s rat-a-tat batting approach is not without its share of risks, though. The two tour games ahead of the series saw England’s wheels coming off in the middle overs after the batsmen refused to lower the gear. England went from 106 for 1 to 191 for 5 before eventually completing a successful chase of 305 in the first game, then lost eight wickets for 88 runs to post a sub-par 282 on a good batting track in the second.India’s captain Virat Kohli was quick to spot the trait, and said England’s approach would prove counter-productive if it wasn’t tempered with strike-rotation.”I’ve always felt, to be a consistent performer in the ODI format you need to understand strike rotation as well. You just can’t go with one sort of momentum,” he said.”Against a side like that, you need to be more aggressive in terms of wanting to pick up wickets. If you think of bowling dot balls, they can feed on that – that is something I’ve observed. It just takes one mistake to change the mindset completely about being offensive, and then things can turn around pretty quickly.”It’s going to be interesting how hard they come initially, but as I said, in ODIs we’ve seen it a lot of times that, when teams start off really well in the first 10, they really dominate and, once you lose two-three wickets in the middle phase, unless you know how to rotate the strike, it gets very, very difficult.”Morgan said he didn’t want to limit his batsmen’s instincts, but admitted it was a tricky balance between batting aggressively and settling for singles. “Some guys find it easier than others when they fall in and out of form,” he said. “You can play smart cricket and you can pat somebody on the back and be 10 overs, none for 45, and you say ‘yeah, that’s really smart cricket’. But then you lose the game by 50 runs.”