England coach Matthew Mott says there is no divide in the camp after Eoin Morgan’s claim during World Cup
England head coach Matthew Mott has rubbished the claims made by former captain Eoin Morgan that there is something wrong with the team under the captaincy of Jos Buttler, and that the dressing room is not on the same page when it comes to playing in the ongoing World Cup.
Defending champions England were being considered as one of the top teams before the tournament began early in October but the team has lost five out of its six matches and is struggling to make it to the semi-final stage.
In fact, if the current reports are to be believed, England are in danger of missing out on a spot in the eight-team tournament to be held in Pakistan in 2025 by the ICC for its Champions Trophy.
In their latest defeat, England were beaten by hundred runs by the rampant Indian cricket team in Lucknow despite the reigning champions doing well in the first half of the match to keep Rohit Sharma’s team to a moderate total of 229/9.
Once again, England produced a poor performance with the bat to be bowled out for just 129 runs in 34.5 overs as they have now failed to go past the 200 run mark in three matches consecutively.
Eoin Morgan said a few days ago, ”But there was a different level of expectation in that changing-room. You were only expected to qualify for the quarter-finals. You weren’t expected to compete for silverware.”
“They wanted to win this tournament. After this 50-over World Cup, the next one is in 2027. Eight or nine of these guys will not be here, they will be too old and the majority will have retired,”
Eoin Morgan said.
“In a special time for English white-ball cricket, there will be a huge sense of a missed opportunity, because the quality in that changing-room is hard to come by,”
said Eoin Morgan, who captained England to win their first ever 50-overs title four years ago in 2019 when the World Cup competition was organised in their country.
England coach Matthew Mott addressed the media after their loss to India on Sunday night and said the team is united in their efforts and working hard to put their disappointment behind.
Matthew Mott said,
“There’s every opportunity when you’re losing to splinter and go other ways, [But] people are putting their arms around each other trying to help them. It’s easy to do that when you’re winning, but a lot harder when you’re losing and I’m proud we just keep trying to get up.”
“Eoin’s entitled to his opinion and he’s obviously been away for a couple of weeks with the birth of his child. He hasn’t been in and around the rooms. I’ll certainly take that up with him and have a chat to him. We’ve got a really good relationship with him so if he’s seeing something I’m not, I’ll definitely have that conversation,”
the England head coach added.
England all-rounder Chris Woakes, however, said that the team is currently lacking confidence of putting up strong performances on the field and this has been the reason behind their poor performances in the World Cup.
Chris Woakes told Sky Sports,
”If we could buy some confidence at the minute, we’d spend a lot of money on it. It’s hard to bottle that up, isn’t it? When you haven’t got confidence, you tend to play some rash shots, or make some decisions where you’d like to have that go again.
England are currently the defending champions in both 50 overs and T20 formats world titles but they are not playing like the winning side they were at least a couple of years ago. Chris Woakes said that it is very difficult for players to keep putting up consistent performances in alien conditions like that in India.
“But that’s top elite-level sport, isn’t it? You know you have no given right to perform well at this level. World Cups are incredibly hard to win, and we’ve been fortunate to be on the good side of it in 2019 and 2022,”
said Chris Woakes.
He added,
“But coming into Indian conditions, you’ve got to have every little part of your game ticking. If not everyone’s playing well, you need to dovetail, and we certainly haven’t done that either.”