One tour down, one more to go. England’s winter of T20 cricket rolls on to Australia, and the World Cup. Having beaten Pakistan by 67 runs in the decisive game of this seven-match series, their stand-in captain, Moeen Ali, believes the team are good and ready for their run at the tournament. “If you look at the last two games of this series, both must-win matches, going into a World Cup that’s really important, because the pressure to perform was huge,” Moeen said. “We’re in a very good position now going into the World Cup.” Moeen stopped short of describing them as favourites.
He thinks that is India and Australia. “But I know we’re a very dangerous team to play and a lot of teams will fear playing us.” England will find out how they measure up against Australia in Perth this Sunday, when they play the first of three more T20 matches.
After that, incredibly, they play another warm-up match against Pakistan, who they will no doubt be eager to find out all about after a mere seven games against them in the last fortnight.
Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week’s action Moeen was particularly frustrated by the fourth and fifth of them, which his team lost while chasing low totals. “In the end, we’ll look back and think if we were really on it we would have won 6-1 in this series, so we were disappointed with those two in particular.” But the disappointment was softened “by the way the new guys have played, particularly Ben Duckett and Harry Brook, who have been outstanding in almost every game, and the way Mark Wood and Chris Woakes have come back after long injuries”.