Paul Collingwood basking in T20 glory
Paul Collingwood is over the moon after becoming the first English captain to lead his team to an ICC World title. England defeated old rivals Australia in the final of the third edition of the T-20 World championship held last Sunday at the Kensington oval in Barbados.
This was England’s first win in an ICC event, in a staggering 18 attempts spanned over 35 long years. The Englishmen had made it to four finals, including three fifty over World cup and one ICC Champions trophy events, yet failed to win on any occasion, narrowly losing out at least thrice.
But the team led by Paul Collingwood was different; it had belief and confidence in their abilities, something that the England sides of the past were not renowned for, and a beaming Collingwood pinpoints the coach and test captain for the reversal in his team’s attitude.
“A lot of success we have had over the last few weeks will go down to a lot of values Andrew Flower and Andrew Strauss have incorporated over the past year”.
It is hard to imagine that the player who made an inauspicious start to his international career, back in 2001 would one day lead his country to the elusive ICC title. Collingwood failed to impress with the bat or the ball in his debut game against a formidable Pakistan line-up at the Edgbaston in Birmingham, in the opening match of a three-nation tournament also featuring Australia.
Similarly he had an ordinary start in test cricket, and only established himself in the longest format of the games three years ago. He was extremely lucky to have been awarded the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for his meagre 10 runs in the final test of the historic Ashes series that England won after 19 years. After being ridiculed in the media, Collingwood came back with a bang, and has now accumulated ten test hundreds from 59 test matches at a healthy average of 43 runs per innings.
The batsman attributes his success to his love for the game “I would like to think that I have worked all the way through out my career to play the game that I love and all the benefits that come from the game are a real bonus”.
“I sincerely think that you play for the love of the game and everything else is the reward for all the hard work and sacrifice you make”.
“What you do is to try and become better and better, that is where we have to get to. The England cricket side has to never stop improving”.
Shedding light on his team’s remarkable win in the West Indies, Collingwood thinks that it was the confidence flowing in the ranks of his troops that led to the historic triumph, “Once we got past Guyana and a near slip-up against Ireland, there was a lot of confidence in the dressing room”.
“I think we always had the skills but we were also thinking very well and the momentum was building all the time after each win and the confidence was growing.
“We struck with that brand of cricket in pressure situations and the semi-final and final. The feeling in the dressing room does not get better than that. In fact a lot of players were saying it’s up there with the Ashes win last year”.
With a history defying win under their belt, the English team would be gearing up for the greatest challenge of them all in an Ashes series in Australia with renewed optimism and belief that they can achieve absolutely anything, and for sure Paul Collingwood remains a vital cog in the English squad.
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