Skipper Iyer terms India’s performance ‘atrocious and awful’ after huge loss in 3rd T20I

Nottingham, July 8 (IANS) Captain Shreyas Iyer described India’s performance as ‘atrocious and awful’ after suffering a huge 125-run loss against England in the third T20I , which is their biggest T20I defeat by runs.

England produced a clinical all-round performance to thrash Team India by 125 runs, taking a commanding 2-0 lead in the five-match series after the opening game was washed out. The loss also marked the first time India have been defeated by a margin of over 100 runs in men’s T20Is.

“I think it was atrocious. I couldn’t use a better word, honestly,” Iyer said at the post-match press conference. “Losing by such a big margin is definitely not acceptable,” “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.

Asked to bat first, England piled up an imposing 201/7 in their 20 overs, riding on a fluent 70 off 44 balls from Phil Salt. The opener struck aggressively at the top before Sam Curran’s late cameo of 41 off just 24 deliveries ensured the hosts crossed the 200-run mark.

In reply, India’s batting crumbled under sustained pressure from England’s pace attack. Chasing 202, the visitors were bundled out for just 76 in 11.4 overs, suffering one of their heaviest defeats in T20I cricket.

“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,” said Iyer

“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,” he added.

With two more matches to go, England can’t lose this series against the reigning T20 World Cup winner as the first T20I was washed out. Iyer, meanwhile, called on his team-mates to take up 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 have to think by himself and see how they can win the matches and take that sort of responsibility,” he conlcuded.

–IANS

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