Knight confident of strong start after learning from 2023 semi-final exit
Media release
England captain Heather Knight believes her side have learned the right lessons from semi-final defeat a year ago ahead of the opening match of their ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2024 campaign.
Knight’s side open their campaign against Bangladesh on Saturday, as they bid to get their tournament off to a winning start.
England will be aiming to at least match their run to the semi-final last year but Knight is confident her team are solely focussed on their opener against Bangladesh, who already have a win to their name after defeating Scotland, having learned first-hand the dangers of getting ahead of themselves in their surprise defeat to South Africa in last year’s tournament.
“It is important we don’t look too far ahead,” she said. “Last World Cup in that semi-final against South Africa, we probably looked ahead a little bit and some of the players started to turn their heads to what was potentially going to be a final.
“That was a real big mistake that we have learned from really well. It is important to stay present and T20 cricket is a format that is hard to be consistent and one-off games are tough to win.
“We are not thinking about Australia at all at the moment, all we are thinking about is Bangladesh.
“As a team we learned a huge amount from that game. You have a tendency to look really deeply into the game because of what was on it, the fact it was a semi-final, but games like that don’t define you as a team.
“You can learn a huge amount from them, and we obviously don’t want to repeat the things we learned in the future.”
Topping Group B will give England the greatest chance of avoiding Australia until the final, but they will have to get past West Indies, South Africa and Scotland alongside Bangladesh before thoughts can turn to silverware.
And Knight knows they will have to be at their best to do so before they can even think about facing Australia.
“They [Australia] will go in favourites for sure, their success in this event has been huge,” she said.
“We feel in a really good place, we have been playing some brilliant cricket and our first goal is to try and make it to those semi-finals and make it out of the group stage. We are not looking too far ahead, albeit every captain is saying that.
“We are pretty confident in what we bring, we can beat anyone on our best day and our challenge now is just to do that on the biggest stage, try and bring our best cricket as much as we can.”
England arrive in the UAE off the back of an impressive home summer that saw them whitewash both Pakistan and New Zealand.
It follows on from series victories over India and New Zealand over the winter and a pair of victories as part of the 2023 Ashes against Australia.
Knight insisted England’s good form has only prompted a positive mood within the camp and shown them how to win in a variety of ways.
She added: “We take a huge amount of confidence from the way we have played this summer.
“The way we have evolved as a side has been brilliant. We feel like we have added a little bit of smartness alongside the way we want to play.
“That is going to be really important on these pitches, there are times we are going to have to graft a bit, the boundaries are big and on slow wickets we are going to have to adapt to what is in front of us and be really smart with how we go about things.
“That series against New Zealand in particular, finding different ways to win and having different people stand up at different times. I don’t think it adds pressure, it has given us a load of confidence that when we play our best cricket, we can beat anyone.
“The way we played against Australia last year in the Ashes is the blueprint to how we want to play against any team, regardless of it being Australia or whoever.”