Bhuvneshwar rues India's loss
Bhuvneshwar rues India's loss

Right from the toss to the four that Moises Henriques hit to seal the game for Australia, nothing went India’s way in the second T20 International on Tuesday (October 10) as they lost the game by eight wickets. The win not only allowed the visitors to level the three-match series, but it also helped them to end their seven-match losing streak against the Men in Blue in the shortest format of the game.

After being asked to bat first, India’s batting came a cropper on a moist pitch that assisted the pacers. Jason Behrendorff was the destructor-in-chief taking 4 for 21 as the hosts were all out for 118. In reply, Australia began shakily, losing both of its openers with only 13 runs on the board but Moises Henriques (62) and Travis Head (48) stitched together an unbeaten partnership of 109 runs to guide the visitors to a series-levelling win.

Speaking after the game, India fast-bowler Bhuvneshwar Kumar admitted that the wicket was tough to bat on before ruing the team’s failure to pick up wickets in the middle-overs.

“It was a tough wicket for batting. Rain was around, it was a damp. So you know, Australian bowlers made the most of the wicket. We tried our best to take initial wickets,” Bhuvneshwar said after the loss. “If you have to win the match, you have to keep taking wickets especially in the middle overs which we couldn’t do. I would say they bowled better than us.”

Bhuvneshwar called it an off day for the team and praised Behrendorff for the decisive spell.

“I think we tried to rebuild it again. But we couldn’t do it. We can’t really point a finger on someone and say it was their fault. It was just an off day for us,” said Bhuvneshwar. “He [Behrendorff] bowled really well. He made full use of the wicket. It was the perfect kind of wicket for the line and length he bowled. You need to be bit fortunate to get three or four wickets in the T20s. Rohit Sharma’s wicket and Kohli’s wicket were the crucial point for us, in the first over itself.”

Australia skipper David Warner bowled Behrendorff out upfront in a bid to take more wickets but his Indian counterpart Virat Kohli did not adopt the same tactic for his pacers. When asked about it, Bhuvneshwar said:

“That is something part of a strategy… what the captain is thinking, what he wants to do. He made us bowl three overs each in the Powerplay and we took a wicket each. It is up to him if he wanted us to bowl, we could have completed our quota. But that was his [Virat Kohli] thinking. We can’t really say we could have bowled the way we began.”

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