BSS, Nagpur :
India captain Rohit Sharma ruled out any favourite tag despite winning the second match in emphatic manner to level the series as he stressed on to put up better show than Bangladesh in the series deciding third T20I in Nagpur on Sunday.
He said that the favourite tag doesn’t work in T20I cricket and hence it is important to be better than the opponents on the particular day.
“We don’t believe in being favorites at all. We just have to go out there and be at our best. That is how you win games, not by having a tag of being favorites,” he said here on Saturday.
“You have to be good on that particular day. Bangladesh were good on the first day of the series and they won the game, we were good in the second game of the series and we won. We have to be better than the opposition on that particular day. That’s what we believe in, and that will be our talk as well.”
However India never lost a three-match T20I series at their home den and the record will be intact if they can beat Bangladesh to win the series.
Bangladesh has already showed their capability in the slow wicket, when they registered seven-wicket victory at Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi. But Bangladesh vulnerability in the batting surface was widely exposed as they lost the second match by eight wickets.
Therefore the Nagpur pitch came into the spotlight. If the pitch remains slow, India also knows Bangladesh would get more advantage than them, specially when India possess an inexperienced bowling line up. However Rohit doesn’t believe in pitch rather he said skill and variation would matter most.
“I have not seen the wicket yet but Nagpur generally is a very good track to play cricket actually. It assists the bowlers also if you are bowling in the right channels. Even the Rajkot pitch there was something in there for the bowlers. Our spinners especially were getting a lot of turn. The ball was stopping,” he said.
“In T20s, it is all variation and skill level and we displayed that in the last game. To restrict them to that score 153 was a great considering the way they started out. It shows we have got quality spinners who can slow the run rate down in the middle overs. The pitch doesn’t matter if you skills and variations in your armoury,” he concluded.
