Justin Langer wants Australia to impress under pressure in must-win match vs West Indies

Australia’s stand-in coach Justin Langer is looking forward to see how his young side plays under pressure when they face West Indies in their Tri-Nations’ final group match which is a must win game after their fixture against South Africa was abandoned due to rain in the early hours of Monday. The former Australian cricketer as suggested that when a side tries harder, the situation gets worse. He said if Australia goes on to defeat the hosts in the next match, it will be on skill and not emotion, and not getting caught up in the actual game.

According to cricket.com.au, ahead of the must-win match against West Indies, Langer said, “All one-day internationals are pressure games, but certainly in this instance … there’s real pressure. It’s game on. We haven’t done ourselves any favours in a sense that we haven’t got ourselves automatically into the final like we would have liked, so it’s good to see guys under pressure. And this will be a little bit more pressure than a normal one-day international on Tuesday.”

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Under his management, Perth Scorchers have made it to three Big Bash League finals and won two of those. While his WA Warriors triumphed in the 2014 Matador Cup final. Langer has enough experience in guiding a side through crunch situations.

“Sometimes in big games what you tend to do is over-analyse it. You want everything to be perfect but often … the less you can put in their mind, the more you can just let them go and play (the better). We don’t have team meetings in Twenty20 cricket (with the Scorchers). We might have one or two dots up on the board,” he said.

“And people will talk about all this analysis of different oppositions. Well, I must be doing it wrong at the Scorchers, because we tend to go the opposite way. We want to simplify it, particularly for young minds. And for senior players, they’ve been there before. We don’t need to complicate it for them. They’ve got their cues, they know their processes. So we’ll just try and keep it as simple as possible and hopefully they can go out and play and enjoy the experience of playing at this magnificent ground,” Langer added.