Tim Southee, the leader of New Zealand, is happy that his team had to work hard in the United Arab Emirates to win the game 2-1 on Sunday.
Even though they were missing several key players, the foreigners won the first T20 match by a narrow margin. However, in the second T20 match, UAE shocked everyone by beating New Zealand for the first time in any format.
New Zealand played better in the final game on Sunday. Will Young hit 56 runs in his first match of the series, and Mark Chapman made 51 runs to help New Zealand score 166-5.
Southee said that New Zealand’s “best performance of the series” came from Ben Lister’s 3-35 against the hosts, who scored 134-7.
“We expected a tough challenge in these conditions,” Southee said, referring to the heat after they won by 32 runs at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium.
“Like I said at the start of the series, they’re a growing team that’s always getting better, and we saw that in the first two games of the series,” he said.
“It was nice that Chapman and Will Young, who joined the team after the first two games, were able to work well together there.
New Zealand will go to England at the end of this month to play four Twenty20 and the same number of One-Day Internationals. Then, in October and November, they will go to India for the ODI World Cup.