New Delhi: Afghanistan created a major upset on Sunday night at the Kotla in New Delhi when they stunned defending champions England by 69 runs in their league fixture. And a rattled England skipper Jos Buttler said that his team will have to play the best cricket while going ahead in the tournament. England has suffered two losses in the first three matches.
First, they suffered a loss to New Zealand, courtesy of blistering hundreds by Rachin Ravindra and Devon Conway. They then went down to Afghanistan as spinners Rashid Khan, Mujeeb-ur-Rahman.
"Yeah. As I mentioned just before, it's not been the way we wanted to start the competition, but this is the situation we find ourselves in and we're going to have to play some of our best cricket moving forward," Buttler told reporters at the post-match conference. He further said he had full faith in his team to pull through this crisis.
"Yeah, it's a big setback obviously. Before the tournament starts you have a different idea of how the first three games would pan out. We've got to show a lot of character, a lot of resilience within the team and most of all a lot of belief. There were a lot of excellent players in there and we haven't played well enough today (on Sunday), but we must keep that belief," said Buttler.
Afghanistan scored their second-highest World Cup total courtesy of a fine 80-run knock from opener Rahmanullah Gurbaz and a superb 28-run cameo by Mujeeb Ur Rahman in the final overs. Afghanistan didn't lose a wicket till they had crossed the century mark. England, on the other hand, were 91/4 at one stage.
"No, we didn't, no we started poorly, the first ball of the game I missed one and it sort of set the tone for that first 10 overs, we didn't hit the areas that we wanted to and credit to Gurbaz (80 runs) as he put us under a lot of pressure," he added. England's aggressive style of batting, called 'Bazball', has come to epitomise their cricket in all three formats, more so in Tests under coach Brendon McCullum.
Questioned if the team could not execute its plans properly, Buttler said, "We always want to play positive and be aggressive and some days you don't play as well as you want to. Though Afghanistan built good pressure on us, maybe the wicket didn't play exactly how we thought it would play and maybe the dew didn't come in as much as we thought as well." England will next play South Africa at the iconic Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai on Saturday, October 21 in a day-night game.
