Melbourne, September 03: Nathan Bracken believes England will use their Ashes victory as motivation to win the one-day series and complete a grand summer for England and a miserable one for Australia.
Cricket’s oldest rivals will face each other for the first time in the first ODI match on Friday after the recent Ashes series. Though they were to have met in two Twenty20 matches, both were washed out.
“The England side will be using the Ashes win as a motivation to try and beat us here in both forms,” the 31-year-old said.
“They will want to win the one form of the game that is left and walk away saying we beat Australia in both the Tests and the one-dayers.
“That will be their goal for the series and for us it will be our aim to stop them.”
Even though England struggled to beat Ireland by 3 runs recently, and had a relatively lacklustre World Twenty20 campaign, Bracken feels the hosts have the quality to mount a strong challenge.
“On paper the England side has a lot of good cricketers in it,” he said.
“They have a lot of good players who are coming out of a good Ashes series of performing well and plus there’s also a few new guys who have been chucked in there who are eager to impress.
“The series is in England as well so if you are an English player playing in England there is no more motivation than playing Australia here.”
The last time the two sides met in an ODI series was in 2007 when England surprised the hosts down under by beating them in the Commonwealth Bank Series shortly after squandering the Ashes 5-0.
Bracken believes that loss will give the Australians an added incentive to beat their old rivals in this ODI series.
“The last ODI series here was a draw and the last time England was in Australia England won, so realistically we haven’t beaten England in a one day series either here or in Australia for the last two times so we are trying to get revenge for those two,” the left arm seamer said.
“We haven’t been consistent enough in our one-day form, there has been glimmers of what we can do.
“We have put on good performances in Dubai (against the West Indies) and we played well at the end of the South Africa tour.
“But the consistency that we have prided ourselves on for as long as we can remember is probably not as good as we have expected it to be.”
—–Agencies