New Zealand will be emboldened by their six-wicket victory over India as they chased down the low total with minimal fuss in their first ICC Men's Cricket World Cup warm-up match at Kennington Oval on Saturday. Although both bowling and batting department delivered, it was the former which helped them register a thumping victory after they restricted India to just 179 runs.
New Zealand pacer Trent Boult showed a scintillating performance as he took four wickets in the match and gave away just 33 runs. Boult has given the credit to the swinging of balls for his performance and raised his concern about times when things won't go as it did in the warm-up match.
"Nice to see it swinging around a little bit. I'd love to expect that everywhere, some good wickets around the country. It's going to be a good challenge, but us as a bowling unit, we're definitely looking forward to it, but we'll take some confidence out of today (Saturday). But yeah, the biggest challenge will be when it's not swinging and not nipping around a little bit. Then how do we take wickets? So we'll look at that," ICC quoted Boult, as saying.
In England, batsmen have dominated the one-day international (ODI) cricket as in the recent years, teams have managed to put up 300+ runs on the board. In the recently concluded five-match ODI series between England and Pakistan, the former managed to score 300 plus in all the four matches, after the first match got abandoned due to rain.
Therefore, to restrict the batsmen from scoring big totals, Boult put emphasis on taking early wickets to put pressure on the batting side.
"We know what early wickets does to the batting side. We want to be as aggressive as we can to try and get into any team's batting order, so we know if we get two or three wickets at the top of the order, it puts a lot of pressure on the opposition. That is the basic plan, and for me, it's about pitching the ball up and swinging the ball around as much as it can," he said.
New Zealand will face West Indies for their second warm-up match on May 28 before heading to the World Cup where they will open their campaign against Sri Lanka on June 1.
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