Follow UsWhen England got 351 runs on board, the mood in the camp was one of delight that they could tick off two points and an important win against their name. But as it turned out, it proved to be a disastrous night out as Australia chased down 352 with ease, the highest-ever run chase in Champions Trophy history.
After that defeat, England face a tricky situation—a do-or-die match against Afghanistan on February 26 at the Gaddafi Stadium. Ahead of the much-awaited clash, their skipper, Jos Buttler, insisted that the equation is pretty simple: they have to win two games of cricket.
“I think the equation would be the same no matter what, we need to win two games of cricket, first of all we focus fully on tomorrow, its going to be a tough test against Afghanistan, but we're really excited for that challenge,” Buttler said in the pre-match press conference.
“Everyone's very much looking forward to the game, try to build on the positives of the last performance and try to take home the victory.”
Buttler insisted that the conditions wouldn’t be too outrageously different from what they encountered at the same venue a few days ago.
“No, not necessarily. I don't think conditions are going to be too outrageously different, to be honest. So, look, as I said, we've really focused one game at a time. We focused hard on the Australia game and we didn't get the result that we wanted. So, we dust ourselves down and prepare really well for tomorrow and get the level of performance that'll give us a positive result,” he said.
Another thing that concerns England is Harry Brook’s form, with the Yorkshire man having a dip with the bat. Across his last five international matches, the right-handed batter has scores of 3, 19, 31, 0 and 2. However, that isn’t going to concern the England skipper, Buttler.
“No, I don't have any concerns for Harry. Harry's one of the biggest and brightest young players in the world game. Obviously, he has high expectations for himself and wants to perform well and be a match-winner for the side and, generally speaking, a player of that quality; the longer they don't do that, the closer they are always to coming back and performing really well,” Buttler insisted.
“We know he's an important member of the team—as I said, he is one of the best young players in the world, so we have full trust and confidence in him.”
There’s a lot on stake for Buttler, the skipper, who hasn’t had the best of runs, with four losses on the trott. But Buttler isn’t too worried about those stats, and revealed that he’s only focused on doing the best for the team.
“Yeah absolutely I think anytime as an England captain, you want to perform and you want to perform well and you want to lead your team to winning games of cricket. We haven't been doing that enough in the recent past, but very soon as you sort of catch yourself thinking about any negative things or those kind of things, trying to completely flip that and focus on all the positive things that could go right and where you can take the team. So, yeah, very much focused on that,” he concluded.