Women's T20I Tri-Series: We need to improve our bowling, says Harmanpreet Kaur

India are winless in the T20I tri-series so far.

Harmanpreet Kaur scored 30 against England on Sunday | AFP

Indian T20 skipper – Harmanpreet Kaur, on Sunday, stressed on the need to improve their bowling department after England Women’s chased down the record T20 International total in a Tri-Series match, featuring Australia as well, in Mumbai.

On 25 March, India set 199-run target for England to win the T20I, but Skipper Dani Wyatt scored a stunning century which took away  the match from the hosts and eventually the touring side chased down a record chase in women's T20I with 10 balls and seven wickets remaining.

With the defeat, the hosts remained winless in the Tri-Series, and Harmanpreet reasoned “we did not ball dot-balls”. Although, the skipper lauded Mithali Raj (53) and Smriti Mandhana (76), saying they were outstanding against England on Sunday.

As per PTI, Harmanpreet told reporters, “If you see the first innings, the wicket was not that easy to bat on, but the way Mithali di and Smriti batted it was outstanding. I know in the bowling department we are not improving, we need to improve and we will definitely improve.”

She further explained, “Well, if the wicket is good, we still need that much guts to bat or ball on, we just cannot depend on the wicket. We always need that effort to do something on the ground. And at least as a batting unit, we are showing that. The only reason we could not make it today is that we did not ball dot-balls, the right-handed batswoman noted. The skipper said that bowlers are not being able to bounce back after leaking runs in the first over and that was an area of concern.”

Commenting on their bowling and batting, Kaur added, “Of course, you get to know from the bowlers body language what she will do, sometimes when the first over does not go well, it becomes hard for the bowlers to bounce back, those are the areas we need to work on. Improvements come match by match and the good thing is that the girls know these things. Today we worked on that, when we lost Smriti and Mithali di's wicket, we did not slow on the game, we kept hitting the ball and when we need boundaries we were getting that, and that is the reason we scored 198.”

Harmanpreet signed off by saying, “In the last game, when we got a good start, after that our lower order did not perform. So today, when I went for batting, I was looking for runs and whoever was batting with me, I was telling them we have to rotate the strike and we cannot (just) depend on the opening partnership, we have to get lot of runs as much as we can and we got it done.”

 
 

By Rashmi Nanda - 26 Mar, 2018

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