Ireland coach Heinrich Malan says this year’s T20 World Cup will be special but it is a “Catch-22 situation” that his team will be playing India in their opening match.
Ireland, who won their first-ever Test against Afghanistan last week, will play all their group matches in the United States, taking on India and Canada in New York before moving to Lauderhill, Florida to face USA – co-hosts with the West Indies – and Pakistan.
“If you go back a couple of years and said we are going to play cricket in America, no one would have believed you,” Malan told reporters in a video conference ahead of his side’s first ODI against the Afghans in Sharjah on Thursday.
“It’s an exciting opportunity for us but we’ve got a bit of work to do to tick all the boxes before we jump on that plane.
“If you look at who we are going to play, Pakistan and India, ask any T20 cricketer, these are two of the teams you want to play. To know that we are going to play them in stadiums that take 25,000 or 30,000 people will be even more special.
“Hopefully we can play some consistent cricket and a brand of cricket that will be exciting and hopefully get us across the line.”
Ireland face the daunting prospect of taking on India, with its wealth of stars all fresh from the IPL, on a ‘drop-in’ pitch in their opening match in New York on 5 June.
“From our point of view, it’s a bit of a Catch-22 because they’ll have a lot of players that’ll come straight out of IPL and be battle-hardened.
“At the end of the day we can’t control who’s in front of us, but we can try and control the way we go about our business and our preparation.
“And hopefully we can play a good brand of cricket for 40 overs and they’ll take us a little bit lightly … I don’t think they will.
“The good part is they play so often there’s a lot of information around so we can be clear about our tactics. You look at their numbers and their amount of games, it shows that they are quality players.
“But at the end of the day it’s a bat versus a ball. We’ve shown as individuals that we can compete with these big names, hopefully those performances dovetail once we hit that June period in America.”
The current tour still has three ODIs followed by three T20Is, all of them in Sharjah, but last week’s six-wicket win in the only Test will mean it goes down already as a success.
Victory came in only Ireland’s eighth Test although Malan said it had been difficult to gauge the enormity of the achievement at the time.
“It’s tough to do that but when you’re sat around afterwards and once we got our phones back, people just highlighting the amount of text messages, of support, congratulations from around the world, from past players, from past coaches. That really summed it up for me,” said the South African who took over Ireland in January 2022.
In spite of being away from home, the Irish celebrated accordingly.
“I don’t think they [the players] were asking for permission to be honest,” said Malan.
“It was a great evening. There’s a time and a place for celebration and to get across the line in our first-ever Test win, there were obviously a couple of brews that went down.
“It was a fantastic day but we’re on tour with two more formats to come and that’s where our mind is right now.”
© Agence France-Presse
Photo: Gareth Copley/Getty Images
