England white-ball coach Matthew Mott conceded that the title defence for the defending ODI World Cup champions is over after an eight-wicket drubbing by Sri Lanka on October 26 in Bengaluru. This was England’s fourth loss in five games, having already lost to New Zealand, Afghanistan and South Africa.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!After the loss, England’s hopes of making it to the top four took a serious hit and their coach Mott agreed that they were in a ‘bit of trouble.’
“Mathematically, we’d have to have a lot of things go our way,” Mott told Sky Sports after the game. “As I said leading up today, we could control it from there, but it certainly hasn’t done our net run-rate any help at all and, depending on others… we’ll keep fronting, we’ll keep treating each game in isolation and try and salvage some really good stuff out the back end of this. But realistically, we’re in bit of trouble, for sure.”
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England’s campaign never really took off as they lost the tournament opener against New Zealand and couldn’t really figure out what went wrong from there.
“I don’t know,” Mott said. “I just had a quick chat with Jos then. It’s really hard to explain. I think we had a good series leading in against New Zealand. We came over here full of confidence with I think world-class players who have won a lot of World Cups and for whatever reason, we seem to have a few players out of form at the wrong time, and it’s hurt us dearly,” said Mott on the issue.
The Three Lions will now be focusing on ‘salvaging something’ out of the tournament, said Motts, while agreeing that it is going to be a real test of their character in the next four games.
“It’s going to be a very sombre dressing room tonight. We came here full of hope and hoping to turn things around and we were well off the mark and it’s going to be a real test of character to get through the next few weeks and make sure that we can salvage something out of this campaign,” said the head coach.
England next play against India on October 29 in Lucknow.
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