ICC Cricket World Cup 2023 – Matthew Mott dismisses Eoin Morgan suggestion of squad rift as England hit rock-bottom

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Matthew Mott, England’s white-ball coach, has denied suggestions from Eoin Morgan, the team’s former World Cup-winning captain, that an “unsettled” dressing room is the root cause of their desperate form at this year’s event.

Speaking in the wake of India’s 100-run victory in Lucknow, which has left England propping up the ten-team table after five comprehensive defeats in six matches, Mott insisted that the squad remained “incredibly tight-knit” and that their training sessions remained “full of fun” despite their bleak tournament prospects.

“There’s every opportunity when you’re losing to splinter and go other ways,” Mott said. “[But] people are putting their arms around each other trying to help them. It’s easy to do that when you’re winning, but a lot harder when you’re losing and I’m proud we just keep trying to get up.”

Morgan, however, remains a close confidant for many of the players, nine of whom featured in the 2019 World Cup-winning squad. Speaking to Sky Sports ahead of the India match, he had suggested that “something else [is] going on … there has to be,” adding that the team’s under-performance compared to their pre-tournament expectations was unparalleled across sports.

Morgan went further still after this latest defeat, claiming that the mood of the dressing room would be as flat as any that he had experienced in his own England career – with his personal nadir coming in Adelaide in the 2015 World Cup, when their group-stage defeat to Bangladesh confirmed their premature exit from the competition.

“But there was a different level of expectation in that changing-room,” Morgan said. “You were only expected to qualify for the quarter-finals. You weren’t expected to compete for silverware.

“They wanted to win this tournament. After this 50-over World Cup, the next one is in 2027. Eight or nine of these guys will not be here, they will be too old and the majority will have retired. In a special time for English white-ball cricket, there will be a huge sense of a missed opportunity, because the quality in that changing-room is hard to come by.”

Mott, however, was unmoved by the suggestion of disquiet in the camp.

“Eoin’s entitled to his opinion and he’s obviously been away for a couple of weeks with the birth of his child,” he said. “He hasn’t been in and around the rooms. I’ll certainly take that up with him and have a chat to him. We’ve got a really good relationship with him so if he’s seeing something I’m not, I’ll definitely have that conversation.”

Speaking on behalf of the players, Chris Woakes, England’s stand-out performer in Lucknow – and a veteran of both the 2015 and 2019 tournaments – said that the overriding emotion within the squad was “frustration” that they hadn’t been able to produce anything approaching their best cricket at any stage of the campaign.

“If we could buy some confidence at the minute, we’d spend a lot of money on it,” Woakes told Sky Sports. “It’s hard to bottle that up, isn’t it? When you haven’t got confidence, you tend to play some rash shots, or make some decisions where you’d like to have that go again.

“But that’s top elite-level sport, isn’t it? You know you have no given right to perform well at this level. World Cups are incredibly hard to win, and we’ve been fortunate to be on the good side of it in 2019 and 2022. But coming into Indian conditions, you’ve got to have every little part of your game ticking. If not everyone’s playing well, you need to dovetail, and we certainly haven’t done that either.”

Reflecting on the 2015 debacle compared to the current campaign, Woakes agreed with Morgan’s assessment that the players themselves had expected better this time around.

“2015 was a low point. We were playing to a brand of cricket which was old-school, and wasn’t up to date with the way people were moving the game forward. This is very different. Back then, I don’t think we had the players that could play that way. Whereas in the dressing room here, I feel we do have the players that can play the way, and we’ve shown that in the past.

“But we’re not a dressing room at the minute that’s got the confidence of winning games. And in cricket, winning does breed confidence and builds momentum. If you could bottle up that feeling that you have when you win games of cricket and take it forward, you could see a whole different team come out and play against Australia next week.”

Andrew Miller is UK editor of ESPNcricinfo. @miller_cricket

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