England’s Moores faces desperate fight to keep his job

LONDON: England coach Peter Moores faces a battle to keep his job following the team’s inept World Cup campaign which ended on Monday with a 15-run defeat by Bangladesh.

Crushed by Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, England failed to chase a target of 276 to beat the Bangladeshis and will head home after their worst World Cup performance.

Moores is in his second spell in charge and with a home Ashes series looming he needs to find solutions quickly to avoid a second painful parting of the ways with the national team.

“I want to carry on desperately,” an ashen-faced Moores told a news conference in Adelaide, adding that he felt “hollow inside and hugely disappointed.”

Moores made the controversial decision last year to back struggling one-day captain Alastair Cook, only to sack him two months before the World Cup following a heavy series defeat in Sri Lanka.

“There will be a million and one things people say, could we have done this or could we have done that?” he said. “What has happened has happened. I don’t think that’s fundamental.”

What he could not deny was that his team had chronically underperformed throughout the tournament, exposed as one-day dinosaurs by their negative and outdated tactical approach.

“The reality is we’re not overloaded with a lot of highclass one-day players,” Moores said. “It’s something we have to look at. It’s not to be done now. Today is about the emotion of the day for me. We’re out of the tournament. I understand why people would think I’m not the right man, but it’s a bigger picture than that,” he said.

Unfortunately for Moores, that bigger picture includes the Ashes against a buoyant Aus- tralia side scenting more English blood following their 5-0 rout of Cook’s team Down Under just over a year ago.

England begin their preparations with a three-test tour of West Indies next month where another shambolic campaign would put the England and Wales Cricket Board under enormous pressure to fire the 52-year-old Moores just as it did in 2009 following a fall-out with his captain Kevin Pietersen. – Reuters