Nottingham: India captain Shreyas Iyer minced no words after his team’s crushing 125-run defeat to England in the third T20 International, describing the performance as “atrocious” and admitting such a heavy loss was “not acceptable”.
Under Iyer, India are yet to win a T20 International, and Tuesday’s outing marked an abject surrender as they were bowled out for 76 in just 11.4 overs while chasing 202 to suffer their biggest defeat in the format in terms of runs.
“It was atrocious, losing by that margin is not acceptable. First things first, we have to accept the loss and go back to the drawing board,” Iyer said at the post-match presentation ceremony.
After Phil Salt’s 70 and a cameo from Sam Curran helped England put up 201 for 7 in the third T20I, India’s batters were blown away by Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue’s pace and bounce. India were bowled out for 76, their second-lowest T20I score, with no batter crossing 13.
“Losing by such a big margin is definitely not acceptable,” Iyer said at the post-match press conference. “First things first, I feel that we need to accept this loss and completely go back to the drawing board and see what we did wrong.
“Looking at the wicket, I don’t think that it was a 200 wicket, first of all, to start with. But other than that, the way we batted, we lost four wickets in the power play. I think that itself didn’t create a momentum, and definitely I feel that we lost over there,” Iyer said.
Iyer said India did not adapt well enough to the conditions and labelled their execution, with both bat and ball, as “awful”.
“I think you can plan a lot once you’re there in the team meeting. But once you come to the ground, you need to adapt as quickly as possible and try to figure out what lengths are important to bowl on a particular wicket. Like this today, the hard lengths were helping the bowlers pretty well. I think we didn’t execute that much.
“And even in our batting, I think when you’re chasing 200, you need to pace up your innings. You need to have a set of pattern how you’re going to go about that inning. So we fell a bit short in terms of that. So definitely execution was awful.”
With two matches left in the series, Iyer called on his teammates to take up the responsibility of winning matches as individuals.
“We’ve played awful cricket for sure, but a lot of learnings from it as well. Players have to start thinking how to basically make an impact or create that momentum towards the team. So definitely every individual has to think by himself and see how they can win the matches and take that sort of responsibility.”
The 125-run win saw England take an unassailable 2-0 lead in the five-match series, with two games left in Bristol and Southampton.
