Mathews laments lack of preparation time

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews hopes his team does well in the ODI series against India next month, saying they haven’t had much time to prepare for the hastily put together series.

Sri Lanka were roped in to play the three-match series after the West Indies abandoned their tour to India. The Sri Lankan players were in the middle of a break from the game after a very busy season, and Mathews said it’s been tricky getting back into it.

He said ahead of the 2 November opener: “The preparation for the series is not that great, we only had a few practice sessions especially with the weather interrupting.

“It is not the ideal preparation for an Indian tour but we will do our best to prepare ourselves and take it as it comes.”

He added that they’d been doing fitness training in preparation for their series against England in late November: “We had a good break to improve our physical fitness; a good month and a half fitness session, and now we have to maintain that fitness.

“I am sure during the Indian matches we won’t be able to do strenuous training as we did in the past one and a half months, but we will try and maintain it and look at it positively.

“We were preparing for the England series because we knew that there weren’t any tours coming before that. We were focused on a lot on fitness and we just started batting three days ago. We only had a few skill-training sessions.

“We needed to reach our peak levels during the England series but now that we’ve been thrown into a challenge we will try our best to be prepared as much as we can.”

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