Lehmann wants settled side for World Cup

2019 Cricket World Cup

Cricket365
February 12, 2018

Australia coach Darren Lehmann hopes to be able to field a settled ODI side in the coming months with the World Cup in 2019 looming.

The coach also declared that Australia need to embrace a more aggressive style of cricket in the format in the vein of England and India.

Lehmann stressed that the ability to adapt your approach to suit each match will be the key to success when the World Cup gets underway in the United Kingdom next year.

Speaking ahead of the trip to New Zealand for the Trans-Tasman Tri-series Lehmann said: “You’ve got to be more aggressive in England because of the wickets, but then it can be overcast and swing, so you’ve got to have both ways covered for England as we’ve seen.

“You can play a certain way but you’ve got to be able to change, depending on what the pitch is and the conditions above.

“We haven’t been able to have a settled one-day side. I’d like to see us play with a settled side over six months and see what the result is then, see how we play.”

Lehmann feels that the poor performance in the ODI series against England was down to players being mentally fatigued after the Ashes.

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He said: “They were pretty tired by the end of it.

“We certainly didn’t win the crunch moments in that one-day series. We had opportunities in every game and in the past we’ve scored those extra 30-40 runs and taken earlier wickets.

“We didn’t do that. Guys were a little bit tired and down, I suppose, excited by the result of the Ashes, but didn’t perform as well as we’d like in the one-day format. So, that’s another area we’ve got to look at and how we go about it.

“We’ll sit down at the end of the South African series [to review], but we’ve always got to look forward. World Cup’s coming along pretty quickly – I think there’s about 22 games to go before we play our first game.

“So we’ll have to settle on a group of players. We think we’ve got a really good group. It’s just where we fit in, how we look, the style of play.

“We know what England’s going to produce in terms of pitches – they’re going to be pretty good. So it’s going to be a pretty high-scoring World Cup, and we’ll have to look at that.”