Image Credit- AFP
“I think they’ve [India] got all bases covered
and I’m looking forward to meeting them in the final again.”
Mickey Arthur, the team director for Pakistan, was
determined to move past their loss to India at the men’s ODI World Cup, which
was undoubtedly the worst of their eight defeats.
He was honest in his appraisal of Pakistan’s
shortcomings in Ahmedabad, though: they were “a little bit timid with the
bat” and “a little bit intimidated by the occasion,” which
caused them to retreat “into their shells just a little bit.”
Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan, who added 82 for the
third wicket in 17.2 overs, were not the ones he wanted to blame. Pakistan had
155 for 3 when Mohammed Siraj bowled Babar in the 30th over before crumbling to
191 all out.
“Look, they’re classy performers and they’ve done
it day in and day out for Pakistan over an extended period of time. So, I’m not
going to sit here and castigate them for that,” Arthur said. “As I
said, I thought we were a little bit timid.
“I did think we could probably have taken on the
Indian spinners just a little bit more [Kuldeep Yadav and Ravindra Jadeja had
combined figures of 19.5-0-83-4]. It was a wicket that didn’t turn massively,
and I thought we needed to put some pressure back.
“But again, they were building and building
nicely. I think we’ve got to realise that there are two ways to skin a cat. And
we’ve had success by taking it deep and then cashing in at the back end. That’s
been our style, that’s been our brand, but we didn’t play the Pakistan way
tonight, and that was the disappointing aspect of it for me.”
Given that they had won their opening two games of the
World Cup, Arthur stated that there would be no snap decisions made in the wake
of the loss. He did believe they had strayed from their plans to attack India,
though.
“There’s certainly no panic yet,” he said.
“We’ll go back, and we’ll analyse this game to the n’th degree. We’ll talk
to our players. We’ll have conversations about how we want to go forward.
Australia’s our next game [in Bengaluru on October 20]. We’ll look at conditions,
and then we’ll make a selection decision based on our strategy and conditions
for the next game.
“We set ourselves up as a 330 team. We’ve got the
personnel to build and build and build and make sure that we keep that momentum
going through the innings so that we can cash in at the back end. But we’ve
certainly tried to instill in our team that we’re a 330 team, because we think
if we get that, we defend that more often than not with our bowling
attack.”