Angelo Mathews aims to upgrade Sri Lanka's ODI ranking

Sri Lanka skipper Angelo Mathews intends to boost up the team’s ranking by winning all the matches in the ongoing series against Zimbabwe. The 30-year-old finds his team toiling at the bottom of the ODI rankings in the 8^th position and looks forward to improving on that part by performing a clean sweep over Zimbabwe.

On doing so Sri Lanka will overtake Bangladesh and sit on the 7^th position in the chart. However, the all-rounder mentioned that they will not underestimate their opponents under any circumstances. He also admitted to the fact that they need to play good cricket in order to ensure a 5-0 whitewash.

“We don’t want to take them lightly. If we can win 5-0 it will be good, but we are not thinking too far ahead but taking one game at a time. The outcome of a 5-0 win would be ideal but you have got to play good cricket to beat them even though it is our home conditions,”

Zimbabwe’s form:

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe is also going through a rough patch as far as their form is concerned. They headed towards Colombo after a tour in Europe where they suffered defeats against Scotland and Netherlands, two sides who are lower ranked than them. Zimbabwe’s best batsman Brendon Taylor and their best bowler Kyle Jarvis opted county cricket before the national team which also turned out to be a huge loss for the men in red.

“Bit disappointing to lose those two games. We should have won 2-0 in Scotland and 3-0 in Netherlands. But these things can happen. We were sort of trying to find out our best combination to play Sri Lanka so we were trying to do a few experiments. When we lost to Netherlands, we rested a few of our guys,”

The camp was also hit with injury concerns when Wellington Masakadza picked up a pain during training and was rushed to Colombo in order to undergo scans. Besides, four other players in the team fell victim to flu but Cremer was confident of their recovery before the game.

“He had to go to Colombo for a scan, but not looking great at the moment. Hopefully we will get to know by tomorrow the situation,”.

Upul Tharanga is back into the Sri Lankan team after serving a 2 match ban that he was subjected to during the Champions Trophy. 19-year-old Wanindu Hasaranga is all set to make his debut in the Sri Lankan colours and it will be interesting to see his performance. The last ODI played at Galle roots back to 17 years which marked the debut of a Sri Lankan legend. He goes by the name of Kumar Sangakkara.