England head into T20 World Cup Super 8s with a clean slate and a clear aim to improve

Late on Friday morning, after the entire playing surface had spent most of the preceding few days shrouded in plastic sheeting, the sun broke out. The covers were peeled back and the ground staff – a huge team of about 70 people, those covers don’t move themselves – set about trundling their roller slowly across a fresh pitch at Pallekele International Cricket Stadium.

The bad weather had lifted and, finally, work could begin. England were training at the time, hoping their own clouds are about to break and that after progressing awkwardly through the World Cup’s opening group stage they will, finally, in the words of Jacob Bethell, “go out there and give it the full shebang”.

There has been much comment about the two Super 8s groups, determined by pre-tournament seedings rather than results, one of which happens to contain all the first-stage group winners and the other all the runners-up, including England.

The players’ position is that what happened over the past fortnight, as Bethell put it, “doesn’t really matter at all”. Those games are gone, the points accumulated no longer of any importance. The real tournament starts here.

“I don’t think it matters if every team came second,” he said. “Everyone has the same mindset of the main thing was just to get through to the Super 8s and now we’re here, the proper competition starts.”

England find themselves in a group with New Zealand, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, four teams with a world ranking of two, four, six and eight (in theory at least stronger than the other group, which in India, South Africa, West Indies and Zimbabwe contains the teams ranked one, five, seven and 11). But if the Super 8s are already diminished in the eyes of some observers, the potentially significant effect of extended rainfall would cause further reputational damage.

The weather in Kandy has been hugely changeable this week and the forecast for Sunday, when England are due to get their tournament restarted against Sri Lanka, is particularly grim. Colombo seems more reliable, which could be advantageous for New Zealand, who play all their games there. The outfield in Pallekele was exposed for barely 90 minutes on Friday before rain started to fall and the covers were hauled back on.

England won three of their four games in Group C, but none of them very convincingly, and the move to a different country and a different phase of the competition has offered them a convenient opportunity to shrug off any lingering stench from those displays. They need no longer be a burden, though they could still be useful as motivation.

“It’s definitely lit a fire in all of us to go out there and put in some proper performances,” said Bethell, who is nursing a cut on the ring finger of his left hand, sustained against West Indies in England’s second game. It required “a few stitches” and has prevented him from bowling.

“It’s fine – strap it up, keep it away from the germs and get on with it,” he said.

“We’re speaking about how the group stages and all that are in the past and we’re now looking forward to this. As a player you have to draw a line under it and do some reflecting and go: ‘OK, right, we’ve said that, now let’s do it.’ Because sometimes you can take a bit of baggage into the rest of the tournament, where it doesn’t really matter at all.

“Each person will be doing that in their own way and just making sure that, whatever has happened in the tournament so far, you might be confident, you might not be confident, but it really doesn’t matter.

“We’ve acknowledged the importance of [those games], but we said it like that – we’re winning games of cricket when we’re not firing so imagine when we do.”

A word cloud of England’s public statements since the tournament began would feature “careful” and “tentative” in large font. Of their batters, only Will Jacks, who has scored 110 runs in four innings at a strike rate of 207.54, has not been susceptible. As they have now repeatedly proven it is easier to talk about changing this mindset than it is to do so.

“From the whole group there were a few nerves at the start,” Bethell said. “We’ve got a very dominating and attacking batting lineup and it felt like we, myself included, had gone a little bit into our shell [and] just focus on winning games of cricket. That’s sometimes what a tournament does.

“But everyone has that underlying feeling that we’re going to turn that corner right about now … The messaging around our batting has been: we’ve got guys that are playing well, but let’s just release that bit of tentativeness and go out there and give it the full shebang.”

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