Cook relishing England depth

Alastair Cook had Eoin Morgan's batting and the depth of England's pace-bowling resources to thank in near equal measure for victory over Australia in the first NatWest Series match.

Morgan's unbeaten 89 from 63 balls powered England to a defendable 272 for five at Lord's but Cook was well aware, after England's seventh successive one-day international win, that the efforts of his seam attack were hugely influential too.

"Australia got off to a good start - but what is very nice as a captain is when you have got five experienced bowlers like that," said Cook. "You know they might bowl the odd bad over but they don't bowl many bad spells, so we knew we would take it down to the wire."

After Australia had finished 15 runs short, despite half-centuries from captain Michael Clarke (61) and David Warner (56), Cook had praise for Morgan.

But he made sure the seam bowling of James Anderson, Steven Finn, Stuart Broad and Tim Bresnan received honourable mention as well - along with wicketless off-spinner Graeme Swann.

Cook added: "We thought 270 was a par score ... defendable, yes, but if someone played out of their skin we probably couldn't have defended it.

"Thankfully we just kept nipping wickets at the right time."

Cook knows he is in a position of strength to be able to keep calling up a new bowler, fresh and able to wrest back an advantage.

"It's nice as a captain when you can keep pulling on bowlers of that quality.

"You take one off and another one keeps following up and keeps the pressure on. That's the idea, anyway! If we are being really harsh on ourselves I don't think it was a perfect performance in the field today, or close to it, so that's encouraging."