Brendon McCullum hailed New Zealand’s World Cup side as the best of the four he has played with and the captain was certain the Black Caps were well equipped to deal with rising expectations of a maiden title.
McCullum’s side open the tournament against Sri Lanka today at Hagley Oval in Christchurch riding a wave of optimism not seen since the early 1990s.
Thousands of people turned out for the tournament’s opening ceremony on Thursday, while New Zealand’s six pool games are virtually sold out such is the feel-good factor after successive series victories over Sri Lanka and Pakistan in the past six weeks.
Photo: AFP
“Certainly the ones [World Cup teams] that I’ve played in, it’s the best team and we tick most boxes,” the 33-year-old McCullum told reporters on yesterday. “The style of play is something we’re comfortable with.”
“We’ve got a nice mix of youth and experience and a team that I’m really comfortable taking into the World Cup and we’ll give ourselves a good chance, but we know the slate is clean starting tomorrow,” he said.
New Zealand have made the semi-finals six times, but have only realistically come close to making the final twice, in 1979 and again in 1992 when a Martin Crowe-inspired team captured the imagination of the country.
The 1992 side have been prominent in the build up to this year’s tournament and have reminded the public that they had snuck up on cricket’s big guns having been hammered 3-0 by England in a series just before the World Cup.
For this year, many pundits have picked New Zealand as the third favorites behind Australia and South Africa after a succession of solid performances leading into the tournament.
Methodical coach Mike Hesson had set the team certain tasks to achieve in their matches prior to the World Cup to replicate what they might need to do during the global showpiece, such as win chasing a small total, win chasing a big total, setting a big total, defending a small total and recovering from a batting collapse.
All have been achieved and McCullum acknowledged that dealing with those scenarios had helped alleviate expectations on the team.
“It’s something we have mitigated against a little while ago” he said. “We knew that if we put in some performances beforehand, then we knew that we would be able to handle it when expectations rose, but guys are feeling confident in the group. We have got the culture right. We’re all in the right seats in the bus heading in the right direction.”
“Now it’s a matter of how we seize the opportunities we get,” he said.
Taiwanese world No. 1 women’s doubles star Hsieh Su-wei on Saturday overcame a first-set loss to win her opening match at the Madrid Open. Top seeds Hsieh and partner Elise Mertens of Belgium, with whom she last month won her fourth Indian Wells women’s doubles title, bounced back from a rocky first set to beat Asia Muhammad of the US and Aldila Sutjiadi of Indonesia 2-6, 6-4, 10-2. Hsieh and Mertens were next to face Heather Watson of the UK and Xu Yifan of China in the round of 16. Thirty-eight-year-old Hsieh last month reclaimed her world No. 1 spot after her Indian
EYES ON THE PRIZE: Armed with three solid men’s singles shuttlers and doubles Olympic champions, Taiwan aim to make their first Thomas Cup semi-final, Chou Tien-chen said Taiwanese badminton star Tai Tzu-ying yesterday quickly dispatched Malaysia’s Goh Jin Wei in straight sets, while her male counterpart Chou Tien-chen beat Germany’s Kai Schaefer, as Taiwan’s women’s and men’s teams won their Group B opening rounds of the TotalEnergies BWF Thomas and Uber Cup Finals in Chengdu, China. World No. 5 Tai beat Goh 21-19, 22-20 in a speedy 33 minutes, her fourth straight victory over the world No. 24 shuttler since they first faced each other in the quarter-finals of the 2018 Malaysia Open, where Tai went on to win the women’s singles title. Malaysia followed up Tai’s opening victory
Chen Yi-tung (陳奕通) secured a historic Olympic berth on Sunday by winning the senior men’s foil event at the 2024 Asia Oceania Zonal Olympic Fencing Qualifiers in United Arab Emirates. Chen defeated Samuel Elijah of Singapore 15-4 in the final in Dubai to secure the only wild card in the event, making him the first male Olympian fencer from Taiwan in 36 years and only the sixth Taiwanese fencer to ever qualify for the quadrennial event. The last appearance by a Taiwanese male fencer at the Olympics was in 1988, when Wang San-tsai (王三財) and Cheng Ming-hsiang (鄭明祥) competed in Seoul. The
A soccer jersey carrying a national map including disputed Western Sahara has become a hot commodity in Morocco after a diplomatic dispute with Algeria. Retailers said RS Berkane jerseys have been flying off the shelves after a Confederation of African Football (CAF) Cup match against Algerian club USM Alger was canceled last month over the jerseys. “We are overwhelmed by the influx of messages and requests,” said Brahim Rabii, representative of the official RS Berkane jersey distributor. Algeria broke off diplomatic relations with Morocco in 2021, partly over the issue of Western Sahara. The former Spanish colony is largely controlled by Morocco, but claimed