England are sweating on the fitness of pace spearhead Mark Wood for their T20 World semi-final with India.
The 32-year-old has been the fastest on show in the tournament so far, and the stresses on the body come at a price with Wood suffering from general stiffness after flying into Adelaide. He pulled up in training on Tuesday and retired to the dressing room without bowling and will now face a fitness test the day before the game to see whether he is available.
The same will be the case for Dawid Malan who had a light session under the watchful eyes of the England medics monitoring his groin injury and he is in a battle to make it on to the team sheet for Thursday. One man who is coping with his various niggles and will be taking full part is Ben Stokes who is chomping at the bit to get stuck into India in another World Cup semi-final and produce his best performance of the tournament so far.
The all rounder delivered a match-winning contribution to the win over Sri Lanka in Sydney and got his team over the line at the death. And he has told his team-mates to get ready to adapt once again on a used pitch against India that may be a little trickier than they first thought.
The news that the semi-final would be played on the same surface as the double headers six days earlier - when New Zealand played Ireland and Australia played Afghanistan - came as a surprise to England when they arrived at the ground on Tuesday. They are understood to be relaxed about the situation, but it adds an extra dimension to a team still looking to throw off the shackles completely and watch their batsmen take a bowling attack apart.
“I think whoever you face in a semi-final of a World Cup is always going to be tough,” said Stokes. “But this is the crunch time in tournaments.
"Thursday is all about which team turns up and can perform the best. We know we have not quite produced our best performance yet, but this is where it counts.
“We'll have to wait and see what the wicket does on Thursday. It's about assessing and adapting to whatever situation you have in front of you. We’ve come here to Adelaide which has very different dimensions to the grounds we're used to playing on. We've been playing on big square boundaries whereas here we're probably going to have to look to change our tactics around that.”
There will be plenty of familiar faces for Stokes in the opposition team with how much cricket England and India have played against each other, not to mention the IPL cricket he has played too. And he has picked out three India players England will need to watch out for come Thursday with Suryakumar Yadav, Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohi all needing to be stopped at source before they get going.
“India are obviously one of the best teams in the world and we know we are coming up against a strong team,” he added. "The likes of Rohit, they're world-class players, you can't take anything from how they've performed in previous games into these big games because I've seen him do it many times, he's one of the best to play the game.
“Virat too, he has earned the right never to be written off. As players who play against him a lot, we never take anything he's done in the game before as a sign into this game.
"Suryakumar has obviously come in and set the world alight. He's a fantastic player and plays some shots where you're just scratching your head sometimes. He's in great form but on Thursday hopefully we can try and shut him down and not allow him to get on one of his rampages.”
