The qualification criteria for the Champions Trophy 2025 have confused many teams. After England's embarrassing 100-run loss to India, head coach Matthew Mott revealed that he learned about it only an hour and a half ago. The top seven sides in the World Cup 2023 points table will qualify for the Champions Trophy 2025 alongside hosts Pakistan and with five losses from six games, England may not feature in the mega event.
“About an hour and a half ago. Well, the ICC do change the rules quite a bit with qualification and to be honest I don't think it would affect in any way the way we've played in this tournament so it's not a big deal,” said Mott in the post-match press conference.
England are currently placed at the bottom of the table with five losses from six games, the most by a defending champions side in World Cups. They will face Australia, Netherlands and Pakistan in their next three matches.
Barring the match against Bangladesh, England's batting has disappointed in the tournament despite having plenty all-rounders in the side. Against India, they were bowled out for 129 in 34.5 overs. They have been bowled out below 200 in three consecutive games now.
“Well, yeah, I suppose the latest thing has been our batting, the thing that's gone wrong. There's no secret that we keep getting bowled out before that we get our full allotment of 50 overs. So that would be a big part of it,” Mott said about the areas Jos Buttler-led England need to improve.
Buttler was of a similar opinion in the post-match presentation as he said, “At the halfway stage, chasing 230 and seeing how wet it got, we fancied ourselves, same old story. I wasn't sure if dew would come or not. Just the gut feel said that we wanted to chase. That's as good as we've been with the ball throughout the tournament. We created good pressure, we bowled well, took wickets. If you said we are chasing 230, we would have been happy with that.”
“Personally, I wanted to try and soak some pressure up, come through that phase and then build a partnership and sort of kill the momentum that India had. It's about committing and executing your skill. Chasing 230, there wasn't scoreboard pressure. It's about trying to come through that phase. We are just falling short whichever way we are doing it at the minute,” the wicketkeeper-batter added.
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