Afghanistan bowler Hamid Hassan insists England hold no fear for his team ahead of their first ever one-day international meeting in Sydney on Friday.

The seamer believes the England batsmen can be targeted after watching them fall short against Bangladesh on Monday, a defeat that dumped Peter Moores’s team out of the World Cup with one pool match still to play.

“We have a very good bowling attack and hopefully we’ll do a good performance [on Friday] against England,” said Hassan. “We have learnt a lot from our mistakes in the past matches, and [on Friday] we don’t want to do any mistakes,” he said. Hopefully we’ll be better, 100% on correct line and length so we can put some pressure early on the England batsmen.”

The 27-year-old’s confidence is somewhat surprising given Afghanistan lost to Australia by 275 runs in their last match. “My friend, he asked the question, ‘the game against Australia, you were scared’. There is no scared. Afghan never scared,” he insisted. “We haven’t played many games and that is why there is a little bit of inexperience. If we play some more matches against a big team with big names and in front of the media then people can watch and maybe we can improve more and more.”