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| There is room for pure batsmanship in T20 cricket: NZ coach Gary Stead | | |  agencies
NEW ZEALAND, Nov 27: Unperturbed by criticism of their conservative approach to batting in the T20 World Cup recently, New Zealand coach Gary Stead on Sunday said there's "still room for pure batsmanship" in the slam-bang format. The Black Caps failed to win a global ICC white-ball tournament once again when they lost to Pakistan by seven wickets in the semi-finals in Australia earlier this month after their batters failed to fire and managed a modest 152/4. "I know there's a lot of chat around a number of players around the world in the T20 game but, in my opinion, many of the wickets we play on, it's not just about the game of crash bash the whole time," the 50-year-old told reporters here after the second ODI against India was abandoned because of rain.
"We have a couple of players with Devon (Conway) and Kane (Williamson) who probably put in that crafty kind of batsmanship as opposed to those crash-bash style from ball one. There is still a place for those players in my opinion."
"The World Cup in Australia actually showed a number of times that the batsmanship side of it comes into it."
England, who became the only team to hold both the ODI and T20 World Cups titles in the same cycle, have been successful with the template of playing fearless and aggressive cricket from ball one.
"You have to look at the resources within your group and then you got to look at what the gameplan is. Some teams are going down the method of boundary-hitting the whole time.
"But we showed in a couple of games that there's a different way of playing as well. The team selected are the best XV or XI that we had," the former Kiwi Test batter said, defending their strategy.
For us, that's still the way we are playing the game. That may change again we have to keep reviewing our style of play and making sure that we keep up with play."
Stead further said they had a par score against Pakistan in the semis, but it's their bowlers who let them down.
"It's more than just batting in T20 cricket, it's also your bowlers. Pakistan bowled exceedingly well at us, but we had a score that was potentially defendable. We just didn't start best with the ball in the game," he said.
The reigning World Test champions have had a superb run with five consecutive World Cup semi-final appearances since 2015, which included two final outings in 2019 (ODI) and 2021 (T20) editions. |
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