Don’t deserve to win if we don’t grab chances: Kohli
Kingston (Jamaica), July 10
Skipper Virat Kohli was critical of India’s performance against West Indies in the one-off T20I, saying his team was sloppy with the bat and ball and did not deserve to win.
“Even in the first innings, we could have added 25-30 extra. We were on course for 230. And in the field as well, we dropped a few chances and if you don’t grab them you don’t deserve to win,” Kohli said after the match.
“If you give a good start up the order, one batsman has to bat through. I think Dinesh Karthik was good, but we needed someone to get 80-90 runs which a team needs in T20 cricket, I think. Then we didn’t start well with the ball and didn’t field well either. All these games are good feeders of how the guys react to situations.”
Kohli feels India’s T20 team is still in a transition and there would be bad days but overall he was happy with the team’s performance.
“West Indies have a good T20 team, they have carried on with the same team for a couple of years. And in experimental stages, we’d have up and downs. But we need to keep going. We lost one ODI but won three convincingly,” he said.
“T20s is anyone’s game, and one game doesn’t make a series according to me. Overall, we enjoyed the tour,” he added.
Karthik blames dropped chances for the loss
Dinesh Karthik rued the dropped catches that proved decisive in his team’s nine-wicket loss to the West Indies, acknowledging a chance that he himself spilt. “If mis-hits go for sixes then you know it is his (Evin Lewis) day but he gave us two chances, we couldn’t hold on to them. Those were costly opportunities, and in T20 games, every opportunity costs you a lot. We could see the result go their way mostly because of the dropped chances,” Karthik said
‘Happy to notch up a
9-wicket win over India’
West Indies skipper Carlos Brathwaite said he was happy with the way his team members expressed themselves on the field.
“We asked the batters to go out and express themselves. I gave them the captain’s incentive, whoever gets a fifty gets half my match fee. We wanted to put smiles on the faces of the fans and that’s what we come back to do,” said Brathwaite. “We wanted to wrestle the game back from them. We’ve seen the IPL, we know how Bhuvneshwar Kumar bowls at the death and we wanted to make him bowl more in the first few overs and that’s the box we ticked.”
Brathwaite also heaped praise on Evin Lewis for his performance. — PTI
