Former captain Kevin Pietersen is ruled out of the currently ongoing international cricket ODI series between England and West Indies due to an Achilles injury, and Flintoff has been ruled out not only of the West indies series but is also doubtful for the T20 World Cup, where England take on the Netherlands in the competition’s first T20 match at Lord’s in June.

Strauss was not willing to take a position on Flintoff’s IPL injury as he said, "It's not an ideal situation, but any time you get injuries is not an ideal situation. It's so hard to second guess whether Fred (Flintoff) would have been injured anyway, you just don't know.”

About Pietersen’s injury he said that England’s star bat could be well in 10 days time or so and that the Ashes series was still some time away. “Thankfully there is still plenty of time before the Ashes and I think we fully expect KP (Pietersen) to be ready in 10 days or so - there's no need to panic just yet injury-wise, it's something we can manage," he was reported in the cricket news as having said. He was also reportedly not unhappy with the replacements of these two stars in the two test series. "The guys who came in and played in the two match series played well and that's encouraging rather than something to be concerned about," he said.

Strauss, who has ruled himself out of the T20 World Cup because he felt he was not good enough for the format, indicated that it was the Ashes that were his concern. "The T20 is not something I'm involved with, but there are quite a few of the Ashes squad involved in that and if we can get more wins under the belt that will really help us," he said.

Strauss would like to continue the good work that his team had begun in their ODI series in the Caribbean against the West Indies where they performed rather better than they did in the test series. "We gained some momentum in one-day cricket in the West Indies," Strauss said. "We were a little bit Jekyll and Hyde, up and down, but we came through and won the series and we need two more matches to develop something for the one-day squad,” he said.

Comments

Add New RSS

3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

Newer news items:

Older news items: