Shreyas Iyer blamed India’s slipshod fielding for a winless series against England. India succumbed to a heavy loss in the final round of T20I in the ongoing series against England. When the two sides met at the Rose Bowl in Southampton on July 11th the later once again managed to register a dominant win clean sweeping the men in blue of the No 1 spot in ICC team rankings.
India entered the 5th T20I looking for a consolation win but could do nothing but just watch how England piled 257/3 defeating them. It ended the series with a 56-run loss, and a displacement from the top of the T20I rankings. With three frontline quicks and Axar Patel as the fourth option, Shivam Dube and Shedge shared four overs, conceding 61 runs, with Dube picking two. So far, the Indian team has played 7 T20Is under the captaincy of Iyer, winning none
While lauding England for playing “exceptional cricket across all three departments”, Iyer said the hardest part about navigating through the losses has been the challenge of travelling and adapting to different conditions. “Honestly, hasn’t been any particular point but you see we kept on going from one venue to another and we kept on facing challenges especially in terms of the dimensions, the grounds, the conditions,” said Iyer at the post-match press conference.
Just to adapt to it as quickly as we could have anticipated that didn’t happen, that was one challenge and the other one is definitely they outplayed us in all departments I would say. So, I think combinations of all these points definitely led to this result”, he added.
Further more, Iyer opened up on how there are a lot of learnings for the visitors from the series and emphasized the importance of communication within the squad. “Absolutely. I feel that it’s important that we communicate as much as possible that what we could have done better over here, especially. And you see, fielding plays a key role in winning matches. So that is one aspect we need to work on hardly. And especially when you come in overseas conditions, the dimensions of the ground is completely different. So the quicker you adapt, the better,” he said.
In an attempt to achieve victory, India made of couple of changes the final T20I, which included replacing Washington Sundar with Suryansh Shedge and excluding Vaibhav Soorayavanshi for Sanju Samson.