Sri Lankan captain warned his team not to lower their guard against Indians
Sri Lankan skipper Angelo Mathews says his team did not have an ideal preparation for the upcoming tour of India.
Colombo: Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews has said that his team did not have an ideal preparation for the upcoming tour of India as they were concentrating on fitness and not skills during break from international cricket. After their series against Pakistan in August, the Lankan players were having a long break and had just started fitness training sessions ahead of their home series against England, scheduled to be played late next month. But they were told by their Board to get ready for the five-ODI series tour of India, beginning November 2.
Mathews said that there has been sufficient preparation for the November 2-16 ODI series against India which was hurriedly arranged after the West Indies team decided to abandon their tour midway over players’ pay dispute with their Board (WICB).“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 said.
“We were preparing for the England series because we knew that there were not any tours coming before that. We were focussed 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 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,” Mathews was quoted as saying by The Nation newspaper.
Mathews warned that his team cannot lower their guard against the Indians despite captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni being rested for the first three ODIs.“Dhoni is a great strength to the Indian team and if he is rested we have a very good chance but we still cannot be complacent because we all know that India is a difficult place to play cricket,” said Mathews.
“We had bad experiences in the past. We will try and play positive and good cricket to win against them.”
Sri Lanka has not beaten India in India in a bilateral ODI series. Their best performance has been a draw in a three-match series, 1-1 in 1997.In Dhoni’s absence, the Indian captaincy has been handed to Virat Kohli, who has been a thorn in the Lankan flesh in the recent past. Kohli has relished the Lankan bowling so much that he enjoys a batting average of 52.65 and a strike rate of 85.16 in ODI contests against them.
( Source : PTI )
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