Thaindian News

Birmingham, Aug 14 (IANS) England pace spearhead Jimmy Anderson has revealed that meticulous long-term planning was behind the Test team’s climb to the World No.1 ranking and said the next aim now is to dominate world cricket.

Anderson, who had a match haul of six wickets in England’s victory over India at Edgbaston Saturday for an unassailable 3-0 lead and the top ranking, said the team roped in analysts to go over the fixtures of two-three years and advise on how to achieve the top spot.

“One of the first things Andy Flower and Andrew Strauss did was to get the analysts to set out a two-to-three-year road map of fixtures, tours and series to become No.1 and showed us where we’d be if we won each one by a certain score,” Anderson was quoted as saying in Daily Mail.

“It underlined how tough it would be to get the required results, especially in Australia and South Africa, but if you have a goal you need to know how to achieve it. Andy was always challenging us in practice, which keeps minds fresh and maintains a desire to improve.”

Anderson called it a “satisfying” achievement which will take some time to sink in.

“It is very satisfying to have achieved that. But now we’ve done it we need to re-assess. We don’t want to settle for being No.1 in the world. Hopefully we can dominate for a while and become a great England team,” he said.

“We will enjoy this win and what it means and it will take time to sink in. But then we have to get our focus back to playing the final Test at The Oval next week. We want to dominate Test cricket for as long as possible. This is a great feeling and we want more of it,” he said.