India women trail 1-2 in the five-match T20I series against Australia at home.
However, Harmanpreet Kaur praised her bowlers for stepping up and taking charge of the situation. India doesn’t have a full-time bowling coach as Ramesh Powar was moved to National Cricket Academy (NCA) and Hrishikesh Kanitkar was named the batting coach of the side two months before the T20 World Cup in South Africa.
“I know we are definitely missing a bowling coach but our bowlers are taking charge. They are participants in the meetings. They have full responsibility and today (it was) all their plans and they were leading the way, I was just supporting them in the middle,” Harmanpreet said in the post-match press conference.
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She also rued missing the services of pacer Pooja Vastrakar, who was ruled out of the series due to injury.
“(We are missing) Pooja for sure. On these tracks, you need a medium pacer. Definitely, when you bowl back-to-back spin bowling, it allows opposition batters to settle easily. We are definitely missing Pooja because she has the experience of death-overs bowling. We tried Meghna in the first two games but it didn’t click,” Harmanpreet said.
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“Renuka has the experience because she has done well in the past six-seven months and has got good results. Whenever we set plans for pace bowlers she takes the lead and our video analysts give us a lot of information.
Talking about spin bowlers, almost all spinners have played a lot of T20 cricket like Deepti, Radha, and Rajeshwari. Devika (Vaidya) is new to the team but she also has experience of international cricket and has done a lot of homework with respect to international cricket,” Harmanpreet added.
The fourth T20 is scheduled at Brabourne on Saturday.
(PTI inputs)