Cook urges consistency, Clarke wants review

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND – Alastair Cook of England

Manchester - England captain Alastair Cook wants his side to build on its 4-0 whitewash of Australia while his counterpart Michael Clarke has called for a performance review following the team’s heaviest defeat in a bilateral One-day International (ODI) series.

England won the the fifth and final ODI by seven wickets here Sunday to complete the unexpected whitewash of their arch-rivals, Australia’s worst performance in the 41-year-old ODI history.

“We hope we are heading in the right direction. Clearly we are, with the group of players we have got,” said Cook.

“If we want to win tournaments, we have to be playing as well as we are now in the week when we enter those tournaments. That will be the aim. We are desperate to keep building on this, expanding our skills so that we get better as a side,” he added.

Clarke, on the other hand, said his team’s performance in the series was unexpected after the ideal preparation in the warm-up games.

“We need to play better cricket. We need to sit down as a team and have a look at our performances over the last 12 months and areas we need to get better. It certainly wasn’t preparation. I thought our training was outstanding and we played some really good cricket in the couple of warm-up games but we have no excuses,” said Clarke.

Clarke had a word of praise for the English.

“I think a lot of credit needs to go to England as well. They have outplayed us in all four matches, they have been very consistent, their bowlers have bowled with good patience and discipline and their batters have made runs. We haven’t done both. We didn’t have anybody make a big score as a batter, we lost a lot of early wickets throughout the series and we didn’t execute our skills as well as you need to.”