England players face a grueling travel schedule over the next six weeks or so. Photo: Reuters/Amit Dave
England's World Cup defense has been hampered by a grueling 6,200-mile travel schedule for group stage matches.
Less than 12 hours after the World Cup defense began with an embarrassing defeat to New Zealand, they boarded a charter flight 800 miles north en route to Tuesday's match against Bangladesh in Dharamsala. If they go all the way again and win the trophy, England will have to travel more than 7,000 miles.
Mark Wood refused to refer to the trip when explaining the poor performance in the tournament opener.
“I'm not going to use any excuses – the hard way, but no excuses,” he said. “We were beaten by a better team, it didn't matter if we had one day to prepare or three weeks, [if we were] beaten like that, we shouldn't have any excuses.”
National selector Luke Wright raised the issue on travel ahead of the tournament and said: “As we travel a lot and play a lot in a short period of time, we understand that given some of the injury risks that our bowlers have, we need it. cover.
“The chances of all these bowlers from the original squad playing all the games to completion are very small.”
Such difficult journeys and the need to introduce themselves, being in completely different climates from match to match, will be familiar to Jos Buttler's men at the World Cup. Along with India, they are one of two teams that have to travel after each pool match.
England will face very different conditions to Ahmedabad against Bangladesh. In the first game they had to battle sweltering heat of 35 degrees Celsius. Temperatures will be reassuringly cool in Dharamsala on the morning the game starts. But the 1500m altitude in the Himalayas presents a new challenge.
The site of England's second match. World Cup against Bangladesh. Photo: Getty Images/Arun Sankar
In a twisted sense, this is a compliment: apart from the hosts, England are considered the most attractive team for Indian viewers, prompting administrators to share their games between cities. But this backfires during the World Cup, with England's schedule becoming noticeably tougher than most of their opponents.
To retain the World Cup title, England need to do more than just beat the world's best. They will also have to overcome a schedule that could be designed to challenge the tournament's oldest team: as captain Buttler recently joked, England's 32-year-olds now represent the “young ones” in the young-versus-old games.
Indeed, England could well claim that it already feels exhausted. Fresh or not after a wonderful, busy summer at home, they had to travel 38 hours to get to Guwahati, north of Bangladesh, for two warm-up matches. They then had to fly another four hours to get to Ahmedabad to play New Zealand, arriving in the city just 48 hours before the match.
New Zealand would have the right to claim that its route to India was at least as onerous as England's. After their arrival, their two warm-up matches took place in different cities. However, for New Zealand, the rest of their schedule is generally less grueling, with the Black Caps playing consecutive matches at the same stadium three times. So while England will make eight domestic trips during the group stage, New Zealand will make five.
Central to England's World Cup planning was the question of how to cope with the unforgiving schedule.
The World Cup fixture list – both the matches themselves and travel – is particularly demanding for pace bowlers. Being stuck in a plane seat for a couple of hours can aggravate any back problems players have. Restricted movement on airplanes tends to be most undesirable for the tallest men – especially 6'8″ Reece Topley and 6'5″ Gus Atkinson.
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