India’s coach, Rahul Dravid, said that his team needs to get better at hitting because the 50-overs World Cup is coming up. This was after India lost the Twenty20 series against the West Indies 3-2 in Florida on Sunday.
A young Indian team without many big names fought back from being down 0-2 in the five-match series to lose by eight wickets at Lauderhill. Opener Brandon King’s unbeaten 85 helped West Indies reach the win goal.
Suryakumar Yadav hit 61 runs off 45 balls, but the middle and lower order didn’t help much, so India only scored 165-9 in 20 overs. Nicholas Pooran (47) helped King get the West Indies to 171-2 after 18 overs.
India’s captain, Hardik Pandya, said, “We have to learn from all of these games. We’ve agreed as a group that we’ll take the hard way whenever we can. In hindsight, it doesn’t matter if you miss a few series here and there, but it does matter that you stick with your plan. And sometimes it’s good to lose. You can find out a lot.”
“And I want to single out all the boys. They were very good people. Losing and winning are both part of the process, and we will make sure to learn from both,” he said.
Dravid said that their one-day team made mistakes in the series, but he was hoping that they would do better in the World Cup, which India will host from October 5 to November 19.
“Our team for one-day matches is very different from the team we had here. But yeah, it didn’t give us a lot of freedom to change up the pairings,” Dravid told reporters.
“But as we move forward, we need to look at some ways we can improve. We’ve been trying to improve our hitting by having more than one way to hit the ball.
“As these games go on, the scores are getting higher. Even the West Indies had Alzarri Joseph come in at number 11, and he can hit a mean ball. You have depth on your sides. There are some problems with that.”
Dravid said that India was brave to even up the series after a bad start, but that their batters could have done better all the way through.
“But that is possible. It’s a young team that’s still getting better, so there will be ups and downs,” he said. “Of course we are upset. It would have been amazing to win after being down 0-2.”