India vs New Zealand 4th T20I: India captain Suryakumar Yadav came up with a clarification on fielding a lineup in the fourth T20I match against New Zealand in the fourth T20I match at the ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium in Visakhapatnam on Wednesday. Having already sealed the five-match series, India experimented by fielding six specialist batters, including Hardik Pandya, who did not bowl on the day.
While India brought in Arshdeep Singh to replace Ishan Kishan, Harshit Rana was their seventh batter. Notably, the Men in Blue usually keep batting till number eight. The move did not work as India lost the game by 50 runs. "We purposely played six batters today. We wanted to have five perfect bowlers and wanted to challenge ourselves. Like, for example, if we're chasing 200 or 180, and we wanted to see if we were two down or three down, how does it look? But then it's fine at the end of the day," said the India skipper.
"And we wanted to play all the players who are part of the World Cup squad. Otherwise, we would have played other ones."
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The Indian top order completely failed, with skipper Suryakumar himself registering a low score of 8. Shivam Dube came out as the lone fighter and smashed a 15-ball fifty to keep the Men in Blue alive in the contest. However, his 65-run knock in just 23 balls went in vain as India were restricted to 165/10 in their 20 overs while chasing a massive target of 216. Earlier, the Blackcaps produced an outstanding effort after being put into bat first and posted a mammoth total on the back of Tim Seifert's 62-run knock, whereas Devon Conway (44 off 23) and Daryl Mitchell (39* off 18) came up with fiery efforts.
On opting to field, Suryakumar said: "We've been batting really well when we've batted first. So I wanted the guys to take that responsibility if we're chasing 180 or 200, and two wickets or three wickets are down and see how we bat. So it's a good challenge. Hopefully, if we get an opportunity again, we might chase again. But at the end of the day, good learning."
New Zealand finally got something to cheer about and took out a lot of positives from the game. Senior pacer Matt Henry said his team's performance showed that it was built on strong character. "It's easy after a couple of losses like that to go searching, but I think that shows a lot about the character of this group, to keep competing. That's what we kind of hang our hat on. I think the key is assessing conditions. Obviously, we've played on three really good surfaces lately, small grounds and here was no different.
"Very, very wet conditions as well. So I think for us, it's actually just about keeping fighting. You're going to have overs where you can get taken for runs, but as long as you keep believing that you can change it by taking wickets, that's what stems the flow of runs," said Henry.