"Performance in the warm-up match against India won't be having any significant impact in the semis," says veteran batsmen of Sri Lanka, Mahela Jayawardene. With his spectacular knock of 84 runs in the crunch match against Australia, Jayawardene is looking upbeat to face the Indian bowling attack, which has been doing resonably well in the ICC Champions Trophy.
In their final league game, Sri Lanka managed to get sneak through the brittle batting line up of Aussies and won the match by 20 runs at Oval on Monday. But their next test is going to be against India, who are having the most formidable batting line-up in this tournament .
In the warm-up match against India,Sri Lanka lost by five wickets but the former Lankan skipper was quoted by The Hindu saying," India's win in the warm-up match doesn't have any importance whatsoever. It's a big tournament. It's the semifinal, so looking forward to that. I think they're playing some really good cricket. Their batting looks really strong, so those are key areas that we need to focus a bit on."
India and Sri Lanka were the joint winners of 2002 ICC Champions Trophy after rain washed out the finals. Both the Asian teams will be taking on each other on June 20th at Cardiff. Whereas South Africa will be playing their semi-final match against The England on 19th June at Oval.
Jayawardene, who reached 11,000 ODI runs on Monday, was quoted by Indian Express saying ,"I didn't feel anything. Obviously, pleased when the numbers came up. I can probably reflect more on that achievement tonight because we won the game as well. So importantly the contribution that I made towards the team is much more valuable for me."
He concluded by saying, "I'll be desperate for every game to win, simple as that. It's not about trophies or whatever, it's just to win matches. So I'll have that same passion and same desperation to win games, doesn't matter if it's a semifinal or final or just a group game. As long as I have that attitude along with the rest of the boys,
