Defiant Broad looking forward to Super Eights

After India had set Broad’s side a challenging 171 for victory, several of England’s top order seemed all at sea as they were bowled out for 80 – their lowest total in this format.

The match was essentially a dead rubber, with both teams having qualified for the Super Eights stage by virtue of their respective victories against Afghanistan, but alarm bells may be ringing after their defeat last night.

Broad refuted that notion, though, saying: “I’ve seen the guys play spin extremely well, certainly in training, we’ve been learning in Sri Lanka and we’ve developed well. We’ve had a really bad day (yesterday) but it doesn’t affect our destiny. We still get on a bus (today) to Kandy and play in the Super Eights.”

The Nottinghamshire all-rounder did concede, however, that England’s overall performance was well below par.

“It was all-round really,” he said. “We were pretty happy with 170. We made a few mistakes in the field and we probably didn’t hit our straps as well as we could have done but we didn’t get it right with the bat at all. India got it very right – I thought they bowled very nicely. We played across the line a bit too much whereas against Afghanistan we struck the ball so straight and very cleanly.”

Yorkshire’s Tim Bresnan was included at the expense of Samit Patel for yesterday’s encounter, but with England losing six of their 10 wickets to spin, there was a case to be made they should have included a second slow bowler to support Swann, who conceded just 17 runs from his four overs.

Broad added: “We wanted to have a look at that balance of side.

“We’ll reassess for Thursday’s game.”

The 26-year-old acknowledged England have been producing inconsistent performances of late, but does not think their humbling defeat yesterday will affect his players too much.

“We’ve had two pretty average performances in the two and a half weeks we’ve been together but we’ve also had some very good performances so we need to focus on them,” he said.

“I don’t think the guys’ confidence will take too much of a knock from this. It doesn’t change where we go.

“We still need to play well on Thursday and I think we can do that.”