Hope: West Indies need to 'do more rights than wrongs' to compete
West Indies were "not up to scratch" with the bat in the first T20I against India, their captain Shai Hope said after the game, and that his team will have to "do more rights than wrongs" in the rest of the five-match series to push the world champions.
"When you come to India and playing in their home conditions, you've got to play your best cricket. You know they're a very tough team to beat, so you've got to make sure you have more rights than wrongs - something that we didn't do well today," Hope said at the press conference after the game, which India won by eight wickets with 32 balls in hand. "There are a lot of guys who have played here, whether it's in the IPL or previous tours. So we just need to use those experiences and find ways to get better and come back for the next game.
"When you don't put a big score on the board when you're batting first in Indian conditions, it's always going to be tough for you as a bowling group. When you only have 170 [171] to defend and the wetness comes into play, the ball gets a lot wetter, the surface is a lot more placid, so it's always going to be more difficult from a bowling side of things. I also felt when India bowled, their spinners got a lot more spin on the surface, something that we didn't really get a chance to extract maybe because the conditions."
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West Indies were asked to bat by Shreyas Iyer, who later scored his first T20I century, and decently placed at the halfway mark at 82 for 3 with Hope on 41 and Sherfane Rutherford on 18. But by the 16th over, they were 135 for 8, with Naman Dhir, the offspinner, sending back Hope (52 in 37 balls), Romario Shepherd and Shamar Springer.
When you think about him as the options that they have, you will see him as the second spinner or the extra spinner. So usually, as a batting group, we tend to say 'okay maybe target this guy'," Hope said about the miscalculation with Dhir, who is known more for his batting than his bowling. "But still we've got to play the situation in the game. If he's bowling the best on the day then he's not the so-called second spinner or third spinner.
"I probably opened the floodgates for him a bit - I think I was the first one to be dismissed - but I thought that we were a little bit chaotic in the backend. I didn't think it felt as though we were trying to score 270 or 280 at some stage. We just had to play the situation a little bit smarter, maybe give ourselves a bit more time because we know we could always do damage in the backend if we have wickets in hand.
"I felt like we allowed them to get back into the game a bit more as we started okay in the powerplay."
Rutherford went on to score 56 in 34 balls from No. 5, one of the few bright spots on the day for West Indies.
"Rutherford has been playing really well in this format, he's been playing some magnificent innings for us, giving us opportunities to defend," Hope said. "It's great to see him back in the runs. He didn't get many runs in the ODI series [0 and 24], so it's nice to see him ticking those boxes here in the T20 series."
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