Ireland eyes Windies win in World Cup opener

NELSON, New Zealand — Ireland has become synonymous with Cricket World Cup upsets but captain William Porterfield says it shouldn’t be considered a surprise if his team beats the West Indies on Monday in its opening match.

Porterfield has played in all three of Ireland’s World Cup campaigns and says that no-one is likely to underestimate its ability to beat top eight sides.

The left-handed batsman was a member of Ireland teams that beat fourth-ranked Pakistan at the 2007 World Cup and England at the 2011 tournament and he says if Ireland was to beat the West Indies “I don’t think it will be a surprise. We’ve played enough cricket now and everyone knows everyone. There are not many teams that won’t know much about the 15 lads who are in our squad.”

“I think we’re preparing for every game and going out there to win that game and I don’t think it will be a surprise to anyone if we go out there and win this game,” Porterfield said.

Ireland’s confidence has been fuelled by a sound preparation — it beat Bangladesh in its final warmup match in Sydney while the West Indies were fully-stretched to beat Scotland by three runs. It can also hope to meet a West Indies team which is out of sorts, after the controversial decision to omit Kieron Pollard from its World Cup squad and to appoint 23-year-old Jason Holder as captain over the more-experienced Darren Sammy.

But Holder insists all is well in the West Indies’ camp, that the fallout over team selections has dissipated and that his team is clearly focused on its opening game.

“Everything is done and dusted in my opinion,” Holder said. “We’ve moved on from it.”

Holder said the commitment of senior players to the West Indies’ World Cup campaign “has been there all the time. They’re energetic, they’ve put in a lot of hard work behind the scenes. Obviously we didn’t get the results we wanted [in warm-up games] but we’re up-beat to go [on Monday].”

Holder said it would not be hard for the West Indies to put behind them recent heavy defeats in Test and One-Day Internationals, which had also tested his young captaincy.

“Obviously, you go through tough times in cricket and it’s important that you just move on from it,” he said. “You take whatever you can from it and just move on positively from it in the sense that we start our World Cup campaign and I think it’s important that we all put our minds on it and just go forward to play good cricket for the West Indies.”

Ireland has a great deal to play for also as it continues its push to be considered for Test status and faces the prospect of exclusion or at least a tougher qualifying path if future World Cups are restricted to 10 teams.

Porterfield said much had changed since Ireland stepped tentatively onto the world stage at the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies.

“From 2007 to now the main thing is there have been a lot of changes,” he said. “We were going in slightly unknown in 2007.

“That is the difference, we’re a lot more experienced in terms of how much we’ve played and we’ve been around for a while.

“I think the experience is there... there are six or seven guys who played in the 2007 World Cup. That’s eight years ago so those lads, who were young lads back then, have grown up in the team together, played a lot together.”