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As the defending champions India gear up for their T20 World Cup semi-final clash against England, Indian bowling coach Morne Morkel highlighted dew as a concern.
India will face two-time winners England in the second semi-final of the T20 World Cup at the iconic Wankhede Stadium on Thursday. Morkel noted that Wankhede is a small ground and believes that the margin of error is very small here. "I think dew is always a big concern. But that's again something you can't control: the toss. I think at Wankhede there's always that extra bit of bounce. Guys can trust the bounce and lead through the line that can also, as a bowler, bring you into the game. I just felt or feel that the margins here are a lot smaller. The ball travels; it's quite a small ground," Morne Morkel told the reporters. "So you just need to be really fighting that over, staying in the moment and competing for every ball. Because, as I said, a batter's strength can also be his weakness on the surface. So it's sometimes not to go too defensive and keep on attacking because opportunities can come," he added. Following India's win over West Indies in the final Super Eight clash of the T20 World Cup for the last semifinal slot, head coach Gautam Gambhir also said that lack of dew during their World Cup campaign so far as compared to bilateral series has led to their players not scoring at sky-high strike rates, which had become a key part of the Men in Blue's batting approach leading up to the tournament. "During the bilateral series as well, there was a lot of dew in the second innings as well, but we did not see a lot of dew during this World Cup campaign. So I felt that it was not only about the strike rate, but it was about reading the game properly and obviously reading the situation as well. And that is something that is going to be important, and the guys did that really well. Even today, you saw they were chasing 195. We never felt that we were out of the game. Never ever did we feel in 20 overs that the chase was away from us. So the guys kept in control. Yes, there were times in bilateral matches where we could chase the target in 16 or 17 overs, but this is the World Cup. And the pressure is different, and the quality is different as well," Gambhir said. Team India continued its fine run in the T20 World Cup, making it to the semifinals with wins over Zimbabwe and West Indies after a brief, but humiliating, stutter against South Africa in Super Eights. (ANI)
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