After losing to India in the T20 World Cup opener, Australian skipper Meg Lanning feels that the tournament has now become a knockout one for her team and they will take each game henceforth as a do-or-die one. Lanning’s statement indicates how her team will approach Australia’s next game against Sri Lanka on Monday.
Notably, Poonam Yadav’s leg-spinning brilliance helped India beat Australia and begin their campaign in some style. Australia’s loss, in essence, means they should likely win their remaining three matches in the group stage to qualify for the semi-finals.
“It’s not ideal, we would have loved to have won last night. But it’s a long way to go in this tournament,” Lanning was quoted as saying by Cricket Australia’s digital content team.
“I’ve never gone through a World Cup and not lost a group stage game. We’ve got that one out of the way early,” she added.
“It’s a knockout tournament (now) — we probably started that a little bit earlier than we would have liked,” she said.
“But there’s pressure on at World Cups all the time.
“We’re looking no further ahead than Sri Lanka — they’re a good side and they’ve performed well over the last little bit.
“So we’ll hopefully get out tournament up and running when we come up against them,” she further went on to add.
In another Group match, Sophie Divine helped New Zealand win against Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lanka got off to a good start, thanks to Chamari Atapattu and Hasini Perera, the middle order just had no answers to the questions raised by the superb bowling display of Hayley Jensen.
“We know them pretty well — we played a series against them late last year, and we saw them beat England the other day in the practice game,” the Australian skipper stated.
“We’re very wary of them, we know that they’re a threat — Athapaththu especially with the bat, she’s played well against us in the past,” she added.
“We’ll be ready and planned, and hopefully we can execute Monday,” she further said.
“We were always very confident she (Alyssa Healy) was going to come back, you guys (the media) maybe not so much,” Lanning explained.
“It was nice to see her do well. We knew the way she plays it would eventually click for her.”
“Cricket is such an up and down game, there’s highs and lows all the time,” she said.
“So you get used to it as a cricketer,” she concluded.