England sprinter Harry Aikines-Aryeetey has refused to get "carried away" with the team's performance in the 4x100m relay heats at the Commonwealth Games this evening.
The 25-year-old ran the second leg for England as they cruised into the final with a time of 38.78s at Hampden Park, setting up a showdown with Usain Bolt and the much-fancied Jamaican team in tomorrow night's final.
The English quartet is unlikely to be the same for the final, with 100m silver medallist Adam Gemili and Danny Talbot also available, and Aikines-Aryeetey is confident that there is plenty of room for improvement.
However, when speaking to Sports Mole after the race, he refused to predict a gold medal for the team, instead choosing to "stay calm".
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How do you feel that race went, then?
"It was good. We've become accustomed to getting the baton round now, and we're just well-drilled. We keep in touch with what we need to do.
"Adam and Danny are sat there itching and waiting to come in, if they're going to come in, but I think we can be happy with that."
Is it simply a case of getting the baton around safely in the heats?
"It's always the case with relays but you've got to expect to get it round safely. We brought in a new guy, [Andrew] Robertson, for you lot to see and he's normally a starter but we let him hold the last leg and even his hand was pretty steady.
"In a big stadium like this, he's a twitchy guy, you never know what's going to happen, but again, he's a product of what [coach] Rana Reider has done this year in the sense of putting together the relays and the core program for the two months that we were away in Daytona."
Do you feel like you've got a lot more to come?
"Obviously, yeah. The likes of Andrew Robertson, in all fairness to him, he's a great athlete but when you've got the likes of Gemili and Danny Talbot waiting to come in, when we do run the relays, it's kind of hard for us to understand how we can be such animals and be different beasts.
"When I rode down that back straight I felt invincible. When he's running whatever leg he wants to run, you see a different side of us. We've improved that side and now we're trying to bring that into the individual events. So we're actually finding the relay helps so we'll see what happens.
"I remember I ran in Braunschweig at the European team trials just before the champs and running the relay there just helps you get the run and rhythm. So I mean, we love the relay. We wanna come here and put a show on. I definitely think that we might be able to make it look good."
Could you make it look good enough for a gold medal?
"You don't want to say gold. I mean, I don't know what the other qualifying times are, I don't know what other people have done. Right now you can easily get carried away.
"Look at the likes of Lynsey Sharp, she's a good friend of mine and watching her get a medal now I wanna say 'yeah, I wanna get a medal' but we've got to stay calm. We're a team right now."
The final of the men's 4x100m relay is scheduled to take place at 9.15pm tomorrow night, with Jamaica expected to be England's main rivals for gold. Earlier tonight, the world's fastest man Usain Bolt, who will be part of the Jamaican team, told Sports Mole that England would be their biggest competitors for the top prize.
