England coach Matthew Mott has admitted that there has been a noticeable change in India’s batting since they were beaten by 10 wickets in the semi-final of the 2022 T20 World Cup us.
Mott pointed out how Indian batters had become more aggressive especially in T20 power plays lead by their captain, Rohit Sharma, as opposed to its last version where England set up an imposing total before restricting India to make them struggle scoring runs.
In his words “There’s probably only one thing that we’ve spoken about is that we think they’re a very different team than that semi-final. They’ve come at it very hard on the power play for the last couple of years.”
The operation developed by India at this stage might be high-scoring; with Mott noting that this new aggreessive approach could lead to them posting a daunting total and in turn put it beyond England’s reach.
According to him “Rohit (Sharma) with the bat has led the way extremely well and shown leadership in that department, as has Jos Buttler for us. But I think it presents a really unique challenge for us. It’s a venue we don’t know well. We’ve obviously been arm with a lot of information and we think we’ve got a squad to cover it, but there’s a little bit of unknown about what we’re going to get.”
Despite being defending champions, England have something to prove after their poor performance at the ODI World Cup recently. However, Mott trusts his troops can peak when it matters most.
When coming back from this semi-final match- which was played on an excellent pitch at Adelaide Oval- where we took India into bat first which was risky anyway because I thought they didn’t know what was going to be regarded as enough on this ground. That may not have been the case then if I suppose now they would try and get away from us as hard as possible and look to make 150,160. Both have got really good batting lines. The bowlers are all class as well. So, it’s going to come down to on the day”.
Mott acknowledged India’s consistency in making it to the knockout stages of ICC tournaments, attributing it to a quality team and experience.
“What India has done incredibly well over the last few years is put themselves in semi-finals contention and the flip side to that is when you don’t win people look at that as a negative. But I think the consistency that they’ve shown over a length of time shows what a great group of players they are. And like anyone, when you get to the semi-final stage, every team, and the four teams out here, all think they’re in with a chance to win it. And there’s small margins. So, if you take those key moments at the right time, you get over the line, if you don’t, you go home. So, our tournament really starts tomorrow – we’re excited by – we know their players well; they know us well”, England’s head coach added.
On his part however Mott played down England’s inconsistency during this event emphasizing on their present focus and belief in better cricket still coming from them.
“Many people believe that our best cricket is still ahead of us. We have been good in bits, we have done some really good things here but a complete game has never come together for us. So hopefully, it happens against India. It will be an incredible event,” Mott said finally.
