North Sound (Antigua and Barbuda), June 15: Ahead of his side’s match against Namibia, England pacer Mark Wood said that while the team’s position in the points table now looks better, there is still a lot of work to be done after the win do is above Oman.

Defending champions England will take on Namibia in their final Group B match at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in Antigua on Saturday. England is in third place with wins, losses and zero results. They have three points in total. Namibia is in fourth place, with one win and two losses. England will have to win this game by a wide margin to qualify for the Super Eights and also pray that Scotland, who are in second place with two wins, one defeat, one clean sheet and five points, lose to Australia on Sunday.

Speaking at the pre-match press conference ahead of the match, Wood said about his team and his performance in the previous win over Oman: “It feels great. I had to put my stamp on the game and push myself back into the game.” The shape of things and the table didn’t look great, obviously before today, but it looks a lot better now. There is still work to be done, but I feel a lot better after this match.”

Wood said the bowling unit was extremely ruthless during their eight-wicket win over Oman, knocking out just 47 runs. He also praised the batters for finishing the match midway through the powerplay.

“I think we needed that after probably the last performance where we probably didn’t adapt to the conditions either. But I feel like when we got going it wasn’t just a matter of winning the game. We knew we were going to try.” and continue with this quite quickly. So it was all set for those types of occasions and I think the batters did a great job of finishing it off quickly,” he added.

Wood said the group is still solely focused on winning the match against Namibia and other factors such as net run-rate will be addressed later.

“I think Jos has hammered on that a bit. It’s like we can’t look past the fact that we have to play better, cricket and we’ve trained really well this week. There was a good intensity in the training that I felt and then today we were right about it and were all for it. Not that we weren’t ready for the other games, but when we were back against the wall there were obviously some negatives flying around and questions being asked and that. I do too. I am very happy with the bowling unit that we came out and put in a performance,” he added.

Selections:

England squad: Philip Salt, Jos Buttler (w/c), Will Jacks, Jonny Bairstow, Harry Brook, Moeen Ali, Liam Livingstone, Jofra Archer, Adil Rashid, Mark Wood, Reece Topley, Chris Jordan, Ben Duckett, Sam Curran, Tom Hartley

Selection Namibia: Michael van Lingen, Nikolaas Davin, Jan Frylinck, Gerhard Erasmus(c), JJ Smit, Zane Green(w), David Wiese, Ruben Trumpelmann, Bernard Scholtz, Jack Brassell, Ben Shikongo, JP Kotze, Malan Kruger, Tangeni Lungameni, Dylan Leicher, Peter-Daniel Blignaut.

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