Netherlands’ skipper fires a warning to his opponents

Netherlands skipper Scott Edwards

• “We weren’t coming here just to have fun and enjoy it, we’re here to win games of cricket,” says Scott Edwards.

LUCKNOW: Netherlands is going to be Sri Lanka’s next opponents in the ongoing Cricket World Cup and following their shocking win over South Africa on Monday at Dharamsala will certainly have their tails up coming into this game.

Both teams came through the World Cup Qualifier where Sri Lanka beat the Netherlands twice in the Super Six (by 21 runs) and the final (by 128 runs). But Saturday’s fixture isn’t going to be all that easy for Sri Lanka who find themselves as the only team of the ten without a win in the World Cup.

Netherlands skipper Scott Edwards made no bones about what they intend on achieving at the World Cup.

“After qualifying we were pretty quick to set our minds to what we wanted to do at this tournament. We weren’t coming here just to have fun and enjoy it. We’re here to win games of cricket and give ourselves the best chance to make that next stage. South Africa is obviously a very strong side and they’ll be close to that semi-final spot. If we want to be amongst it, we’ve got to beat sides like this,” said Edwards who played a crucial part in Netherlands victory over South Africa with a match-winning knock of 78* off 69 balls that saw them lift themselves from a disastrous 82-5 to a challenging 245-8.

“As a group we pride ourselves on playing total cricket which is, guys that are coming in at numbers 8, 9, 10 have just as much of the ability to put on those partnerships. But out there batting with them, it was just about giving ourselves a chance to go harder, later in the innings. And luckily enough, Roelof and Aryan in there played some unbelievable cameos to get us to what we thought was probably a roundabout par score.”

The most notable aspect of Netherlands’ lower order batting was that they were able to sneak in extra runs converting ones into twos and twos into threes.

“I think a lot of that goes down to our S&C [strength and conditioning] sort of work that the guys put in. It’s a brand of cricket that we want to play. And to be able to play that, guys have got to be fit enough,” said Edwards. “Most teams around the world are, but that’s definitely one of the focus points we have and they’re always nice when you can sneak a few runs here and there.”