Head Coach Trevor Bayliss hopes England can learn from the defeat to South Africa yesterday and execute their batting better.
England lost the second and final Twenty20 international by nine wickets to the hosts, who chased down their 172-run target with ease in Johannesburg.
While the Proteas produced a batting masterclass, with AB de Villiers smashing 71 off 29 deliveries and Hashim Amla 69 off 38, England were left to rue a collapse in their own innings, the last seven wickets falling for 14 runs in 21 deliveries.
Bayliss is confident England can recover mentally and physically following a long tour of South Africa, as the build-up begins in earnest for next month’s ICC World Twenty20, and has urged his players to employ a mixture of aggression and caution with the bat.
“We’ve got to approach our batting a bit more, instead of trying to whack the ball for fours and sixes, we’ve got to play more cricket shots,” Bayliss told ecb.co.uk.
“In India, the wickets and grounds are a bit more similar. So you only have to play cricket shots and the ball will go for four or six.
“We need to be better at the basics. That was a brutal performance from South Africa.” @eoin16 after tough defeat. https://t.co/SCM7kpIGvf
— England Cricket (@englandcricket) February 21, 2016
“The last couple of games we’ve got into a little bit of a habit of hitting the ball into the top of the stand. And we hit a lot of balls – in the last T20 matches – straight into the hands of fielders. It gets down to a bit of better execution.
“Our batting it looked like we would score 200 at least, but we fell in a hole again. Some of it our own doing, some of it not.
“We’ve got to learn and rebound from this. We’ve got to play South Africa in about three weeks’ time. There’s some hard work to do between now and then.”
Much like the players on both sides, Bayliss too found himself in awe of the show put on by De Villiers, who ended up scoring the fastest T20 international half-century by a South African.
With six sixes and as many fours, De Villiers scripted a 125-run opening stand with Hashim Amla, which set up the Proteas’ win, and Bayliss said: “It just shows the world-class player that he is.
“It’s something our players are aiming for at some stage. What they’ve got to do is watch the best players and see how they perform, see what the little things they do in the game.
“The experience he and Amla have got at the top of the order, I think they showed that tonight. We probably felt the pressure of it, the way they came out and played. So we’ve got to regroup and work out what we can do better next time.”
With just weeks to go before the World T20 in India, England will hope to make full use of the break for now, before embarking on the quest for a second world title in the sprint format.
And Bayliss feels the nature of the format means England have nothing to fear, saying: “The T20 game is one of those formats, which can change very quickly and that can happen from game to game as well.
“The main thing will be not to worry about it too much. We have played some good cricket. (We have to) get back home, probably recover mentally as much as physically, it’s been a long five months.
“And hopefully that freshens the boys up. They know they can play good cricket against these players.”
Source: ECB