Image Credit- ICC
After England’s 69-run loss to Afghanistan on Sunday
night in Delhi, Ben Stokes urged his teammates to play more aggressively.
Stokes is expected to make his tournament debut this weekend against South
Africa in Mumbai.
Due to a hip issue, Stokes missed England’s first
three World Cup games and sat on the sidelines as his teammates suffered
crushing defeats to New Zealand and Afghanistan. Their chances of making the
semi-finals have been jeopardised by those defeats, which were sandwiched by a
victory over Bangladesh. They will likely need five victories from their final
six league games to have a chance of making the knockout rounds.
“We’ve obviously been relatively conservative
with him, but the medical staff were always confident that South Africa was a
game we could target,” Matthew Mott, their head coach, said on Tuesday.
“I haven’t had a report on him in the last 24 hours, but before that, he
was on target.
“So fingers crossed, he can tick off all the
things that need to be ticked off and he comes back into that side. He’s like
the spiritual leader of the group in many ways, and he certainly spoke really
well after the game the other day, and spoke about that need to really assert
ourselves.”
Mott said that he did not doubt England’s effort or
commitment, but told his players that they looked short on confidence and that
they had fallen short in their “general attitude” with both bat and
ball.
“The boys are trying really hard,” he said
on Tuesday, “but the two things that we’re probably missing are the
confidence – to puff your chest out, go out there and really take the game on –
and then it’s just our general attitude, our ability to do the little things:
bowl in partnerships when we’re bleeding from one end… and then with the bat,
just being a little bit braver.
“We pride ourselves on putting the opposition
under pressure, and on reflection, we’ve been the reactive team in those two
games. We need to turn that around really quickly.”
Stokes had spoken to his team-mates in the aftermath
of England’s defeat to Ireland at last year’s T20 World Cup in Australia, after
which they won four consecutive games to lift the trophy. And he did the same
after Mott spoke on Sunday, reinforcing the coach’s message about positivity
after a series of tame dismissals.
“Stokesy came in on the back of that and just
really reinforced what was a great message – particularly someone who was
sitting on the bench, and had a bit of a different lens,” Mott recalled.
“Like it did in the T20 World Cup, it [losing] backs you into a corner and
you have to come out.