England, who are in a group with West Indies, Scotland, Nepal and Italy, come into the World Cup viewed as one of the contenders behind overwhelming favourites India.<\/p>\n
England’s 3-0 win in Sri Lanka, where they will play their entire Super 8 phase should they qualify, means they have won 10 of their past 11 T20s.<\/p>\n
After missing the final T20 against Sri Lanka with a back spasm, key opening batter Phil Salt has been passed fit for England’s tournament opener – their first meeting in any format against Nepal.<\/p>\n
Left-arm opening bowler Luke Wood has been preferred to Jamie Overton.<\/p>\n
Brook comes into the tournament in good form despite the wider situation. He scored 136 not out from 66 balls in the third ODI in Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n
“Thankfully, I’m fairly good at hitting a ball, so I don’t think it has affected me,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It’s weird, as a professional sportsman, when you get out to the wicket, and you’re a batter, everything just seems to float away and you don’t even know what’s going on. All you’re focusing on is that cricket ball.<\/p>\n
“Even when the crowds are massive, sometimes you don’t even realise that there’s any noise when you’re batting. Luckily I got into that bubble and I managed to bat fairly well.”<\/p>\n
After training at the Wankhede Stadium on Thursday and Friday, England have opted against training on Saturday because it would involve a three-hour round-trip to Navi Mumbai.<\/p>\n
The Wankhede is unavailable because of India’s opening match of the tournament against USA, which begins at 13:30 GMT.<\/p>\n
England team to play Nepal: Phil Salt, Jos Buttler (wk), Jacob Bethell, Tom Banton, Harry Brook (capt), Sam Curran, Will Jacks, Liam Dawson, Jofra Archer, Adil Rashid, Luke Wood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England, who are in a group with West Indies, Scotland, Nepal and Italy, come into the World Cup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-465465","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cricket","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}