England’s Peter Moores retains World Cup optimism against the odds

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/jan/06/england-peter-moores-world-cup

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If World Cups were won by the power of positive thinking England would be considered the team to beat in Australia and New Zealand next month. Despite six defeats in their last seven one-day international series, despite the captain being jettisoned barely two months before the tournament, despite the first-choice XI being little clearer than it was a year ago, Peter Moores remains adamant that his team are contenders to lift the trophy. Dot balls and match-winning runs may have been in short supply in England one-day cricket of late, but optimism clearly is not.

“We’ve got good enough players,” said the England head coach. “We have to play better, but if we put those individual performances together in a team performance we’ll be a very dangerous side and we can beat anybody.

“That’s part of the beauty of the World Cup, the way it is set up as a tournament. Any tournament you play in, if you get on a roll and start playing well you can do very well. We’ve seen that in the past, not just with England sides in the Twenty20, but with other sides when they’ve got on a roll in a tournament and gone on to win it.”

Recent history suggests getting on a roll will be a difficult job in itself, although more distant history suggests not too much faith should be put in recent history – England won six out of seven series leading into the 2011 tournament and that ended in scrambling qualification from the group stage before a thoroughly routine and utterly predictable quarter-final elimination, by Sri Lanka, while the eventual winners India had two years of indifferent results before their victory. And the sight of England shambling into a major international tournament is hardly anything new.

Yet this time around it was all supposed to be so different, with an Ashes series rearranged to allow a near six-month focus on ODIs leading into the tournament. Moores said that the preparations had not been wasted with the removal of Alastair Cook – “All that work won’t be lost” – but he does not have long to redesign the side without the erstwhile captain.

The exit of Cook has at least shattered the sense of stasis in the ODI setup but all this positive thinking needs turning into positive deeds, starting with the Tri Series. Moores and Cook’s successor Eoin Morgan will hope some of the momentum can be built in the three-team competition against Australia and India which begins against the hosts on 16 January and for which the squad departed from Heathrow on Tuesday.

They have the four games in that series, and a fifth if they reach the final, plus warm-up games against Pakistan and West Indies before the World Cup campaign begins on 14 February, again against Australia.

While he and the other selectors saw it necessary to change the captain, Moores does not believe any change in approach is required. “Not from what we did in Sri Lanka,” he said. “Anyone who watched us bat in Sri Lanka saw us play in a different style. We didn’t always execute it perfectly because we got bowled out but we scored at a quicker rate than Sri Lanka in most of the games.”

The “because we got bowled out” caveat is admittedly a fairly hefty one and the 5-2 series scoreline is a statistic that matters more than the run-rate, but Moores has a point. England’s determination to drag their style of play into the Twenty20 era was clear, if only sporadically successful, and he expects Morgan to continue the trend.

“We promoted Moeen Ali to bat at the top of the order, who played a very aggressive brand of cricket at the top,” he said. “We had two bowlers in the top five, which hasn’t happened so much before. So we tried to create some flexibility, we moved our game, we didn’t always execute as well as we wanted to but I think that change of mindset has already happened.

“I think Eoin will drive that really hard and that’s a good thing. He plays his cricket like that, he wants to be aggressive, he wants to look for positive opportunities and I think that’s something that everybody, both on the coaching and playing staff, will want to embrace.”

Aggression and positivity. Positivity and aggression. Even the motivation behind the decision to remove Cook was, said Moores, “to give ourselves more aggressive options at the top of the order if we wanted to use them and to get the 15 blokes we wanted on the plane. Alastair didn’t quite make it.”

The removal of Cook, though, has not removed all concerns about the form of the captain. Morgan made scores of 1, 17, 1, 62, 5, 0 and 4 in Sri Lanka and has struggled to make much of an impact for the Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash. In his last 18 ODIs he averages only 16.35.

“He’ll be desperately keen to make sure that he fires as captain,” said Moores. “Our job is to support him in getting himself ready to play. That’s the challenge for every player – international cricket is about being judged as a player. That’s what happens. What we do know is he’s a fantastic one-day player. He’s got a one-day mindset in how he goes about his cricket and he’ll certainly be up for the challenge.”