The 2019 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup is ready to kick-off. However, the senior South African cricketer Hashim Amla is not sure whether he will be in the initial playing XIs in the upcoming Cricket World Cup or not.
South Africa will play the opening match of the upcoming Cricket World Cup. On 30th May, the host side England and South Africa will meet in the tournament opener at The Oval (London).
Ahead of their World Cup journey, Hashim Amla performed well in the two warm-up matches. The 36-year-old hit two half-centuries in those pre-World Cup warm-up matches. In the first warm-up game against Sri Lanka, Amla scored 65 runs off 61 balls. After posting the total of 338/7 in the first innings, South Africa won that match by 87 runs.
Meanwhile, their other warm-up game against Windies had a no-result due to the rain washout, but Amla remained not out on 51 runs off 46 balls. In that game, Amla had an unbroken 95-run opening partnership with the other opener Quinton de Kock.
Despite these strong performances, Amla is unsure about his place in the playing XI.
According to the icc-cricket.com, Hashim Amla said, “Scoring runs is always important. Whether I make the playing XI or not is not up to me. I do what I can do and what happens after that is for the benefit of the team.”
T20 is different from fifty-over cricket – Hashim Amla
To prepare himself for the upcoming Cricket World Cup, Hashim Amla decided to not feature in knock-out stages of the recent domestic T20 tournament in late April. He spent two weeks with the batting coach Dale Benkenstein and also spent better time with the 50-over net batting.
Amla spoke about this, “T20 is different to fifty-over cricket. I had two weeks with (batting coach) Dale Benkenstein and spent time in the nets batting the way a fifty-over cricketer would bat. It was important to have that time. Sometimes it works out; sometimes it doesn’t.”
Hashim Amla is ready to share his knowledge
Ahead of this Cricket World Cup, Amla has already experienced two Cricket World Cups (2011 and 2015). The experienced South African cricketer is ready to share his knowledge if the situation demands.
He said, “It’s (guidance) something you don’t try and force. It happens naturally. It’s not something I consciously think about but I think it happens anyway. There’s a lot of experience in the playing XI and the coaching staff so that osmosis of information and knowledge is going to happen anyway.”
Hashim Amla is 90 runs away to complete his 8,000 ODI runs as he has scored 7,910 ODI runs in 171 ODI innings. If he achieves this in next three matches, Amla will break Virat Kohli’s record (175 ODI innings), and he will be the fastest batsman (according to the number of innings) to score 8,000 ODI runs.