Ireland want to put World on red alert, says Wilson

IRELAND aim to lay down a marker by not only qualifying for the T20 World Cup next year but winning the tournament which gets under way in the UAE today.

As the only Full Member nation involved, Ireland are expected to be a certainty to join the other 10 elite nations who go directly to the finals in Australia — Zimbabwe miss out as they were under ICC suspension.

And captain Gary Wilson is confident he has the players to do it but knows that nothing but their best will send them Down Under as the No.1 qualifier.

“You only need one or two players to come off in T20 cricket and it makes everyone a dangerous side,” said the skipper.

“We have spoken at length that we have to be 100 per cent every game and, if we are, we’ll win. But there is no margin for error. On an off day these teams are good enough to beat us.”

The format of the tournament is that the 14 teams — with world rankings from Scotland in 11th (Ireland are 14th) to Nigeria, who have replaced Zimbabwe, in 37th — are divided into two round-robin groups of seven, with the group winners at the end of next week the first teams to qualify for the finals.

The final week will give four more teams the chance to qualify through play-off matches. The fifth-sixth place play-off and the tournament semi-finals and final will decide the teams’ place in the draw for the finals, which has already been made.

So, as Wilson stressed, you don’t actually have to win your group to win the tournament.

“We want to do more than qualify. Our target is to win the competition, and you want to be playing your best cricket at the end of it,” he said.

The skipper is happy that preparations could hardly have gone better. In the last four weeks, they have played nine matches, winning six and losing three — the last by one run to Scotland in a warm-up game here in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday — and he believes the squad is ready to perform when it matters.

“We were probably ready to go before the Scotland game,” said Wilson. “We put in two reasonable performances this week, albeit we lost the second game chasing a big score, but our batters