World Cup: Andrew Strauss says England have learned lessons

Andrew Strauss

Having ensured that any weight of expectation had been lifted, by the simple expedient of being thrashed 6-1 by Australia, England are preparing for an assault on their second global trophy inside 12 months.

What had been a period of sustained achievement that started by winning the world Twenty20 title in the Caribbean last spring and ending by beating Australia 3-1 in the Ashes series, hit the buffers with the one-sided nature of the subsequent ODI series.

However, Andrew Strauss, the England captain, was in upbeat mood as he talked about his team’s chances of winning the World Cup after they arrived in Bangladesh. It was Paul Collingwood rather than Strauss who became the first England captain to lift a significant limited-overs trophy – Strauss having already quit that format of the game – but the man who was holding another cherished prize just five weeks ago believes that it can be done.

England’s nine previous attempts have met with varying degrees of success, from reaching three finals to the abject display in the West Indies four years ago, but Strauss believes that it was events in there last year that prove this team can win. “We’re here to win it, and we feel like we’ve got an excellent chance,” he said.

“We’re excited about it, and I think the guys took a lot of confidence from the fact we won that Twenty20. The guys know they can do it on the big stage, under pressure, which is an important hurdle to overcome.

“We’ve got some pretty firm ideas about how we want to go about our cricket here, and we hope we take some other sides by surprise by doing that.”

Aside from talented players England were also credited for having the right game plan for the Twenty20 tournament and that will be even more of an imperative if England are to prosper in what has often been a difficult environment. “We’re going to have to play well on the sub-continent - something English sides haven’t done brilliantly in the past - but I think we have the raw materials, a lot of talent in our squad and guys who can play expansive cricket and aggressive cricket,” he said.

“We’re going to need to do that over the course of the next six or seven weeks.”

Graeme Swann, Paul Collingwood, Ajmal Shahzad and Tim Bresnan all had to leave Australia early but are expected to be fit by the time the tournament gets underway along with Stuart Broad, who has been out of action since an abdominal tear more than two months ago. Strauss – who seemed to be able to impart more spin to his words than even Swann can to a cricket ball – was even able to find positives from the shellacking England had just taken from the old enemy.

“The 6-1 defeat to Australia was not ideal,” he admitted. “But in some ways we might have benefited from the fact that five or six of our players picked up some injuries and therefore had an opportunity to rest for two or three weeks - and we’ve got a lot of in-built confidence from the cricket we’ve played over the last 18 months.

“I hope we’ve learned some lessons about what we didn’t do well in Australia. But these are very different conditions, and a lot of our personnel are going to be different in this World Cup. You’re allowed to experience defeat at times. In some ways, it can be a huge motivating factor for you - as long as it doesn’t erode your confidence too much, and I don’t think it has in our case,” Strauss said, adding of the performance of four years ago “the whole campaign for us in 2007 was a poor one.

“We didn’t start well, never got going, played a very conservative brand of cricket. I hope we’ve learned lessons from it - as we did from the 2006/07 Ashes series - and won’t repeat those mistakes.”

India gave a potent reminder that the conditions will be very much in their favour with a 38-run victory in their warm-up match with Australia in Bangalore.

Paul Wheeler

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