I think they'd be comfortable playing Australia, or us. Not SA, I agree with that. I think calling Australia a 'big hitting team' is pretty far off the mark. Their middle order isn't flush with fire power, or certainly not fire power that has made any waves recently.
Travis Head will return too, making them more balanced. And Australia is Australia and India wants to play them on pitches that aid spin and not really on relatively bouncy highway perfectly suited to their hitters. But yeah if India can dismiss their openers then its relatively comfortable.
SA look miles better than them though
Odis and bilateral series have felt less important for years now largely due to scheduling, franchise cricket and the bigger money that comes in franchise cricket. Icc and the other boards need to fix that.
Thing with South Africa Theyve only been put under real pressure in that Netherlands game and lost that convincingly. Think that’s everyone’s worry with South Africa going forward they won’t have it their own way the rest of their matches and it’s going to be on how they deal with that in how far they can go this World Cup
In their three wins, yeah they looked a lot more dominant than us. But they lost to Netherlands, and comfortably. Let's see how they go against India, they've thrashed three teams low on confidence.
Pretty much we’ll have to see how they go when they are more tested in matches that ebb and flow. That’s where we’ll see how good this South Africa side is
Yeah, fair. But NZ‘s wins since England have come in games you’d expect them to win (which is not to underplay it as SA, Eng and Pak can all attest that it doesn’t always work out like that…) so just find the whole ‘lock for the semis’ line I keep hearing a bit skewed.
Its like the revenge ODI series(TM) after we are embarrassed in a test series away from home.
Root can say what he wants the difference between the 2019 and 2023 World Cup build ups for England is after the 2015 embarrassment they made it their priority to be one the powerhouses in short form cricket and scheduled more odis and t20 for preparation and built a strong side and style of cricket to be successful most that 2019 squad played a lot of matches together in bilateral series also and they won the 2019 world Cup on the back of it.
i think they are still a dangerous side , topley loss will hurt though.
That's fine...people have been saying that for a long time about Test cricket, as well. So with two formats of the game supposedly on the outer or not desirable by the masses, let's see where the game gets to if it's somehow going to be propped up by the bubblegum quick dirty dopamine fix of T20. I don't foresee a lot of positives in that. Or maybe it'll shine more light on Test cricket. Let's see, because the death of 50-over cricket is happening - people are insisting on it, in my opinion without having thought hard enough about the consequences of a game that still requires the requisite longer application of skill that T20 doesn't.
Yeah this world cup is so much better to watch than any t20 tournament in history.
They should have won against Bangladesh. I mean they have beaten 2 much stronger teams!
