Indian batsmen receive plaudits from captain Rohit Sharma for showing intent in the first T20I

Captain Rohit Sharma showered praise on the Indian batsmen for showing intent throughout the innings in the first T20 international against England at Southampton on Thursday. Rohit Sharma was highly impressed by the Indian batsmen as they managed to find boundaries throughout the innings and never let the bowlers have the upper hand.

“Great performance from ball one. All batters showed intent. Although the pitch was good, we played good shots and never got ahead of the game. You got to make use of those six overs in the powerplay,” said Rohit in a post-match presentation.

The Indian captain wanted the team to take full advantage of the powerplay field restrictions and put pressure onto the bowlers right from ball one.

“There is a certain approach we want to take in the powerplay. You got to back yourself in this game, sometimes it comes off, sometimes it doesn’t. The whole batting unit needs to understand the direction the team is taking and the guys were spot on today,” the star opener added.

Hardik Pandya was the star of the show as he put his all-round ability on display, scoring a magnificent 51 off 33 balls with the bat and picking up 4 wickets for 33 runs in his four-over spell.

“I was impressed with his (Hardik) bowling. He wants to do that a lot more in the future, bowled quick and used his variations too. Of course, his batting is there for us to see. That’s the reason we wanted to bat (ball swinging under lights),” said the 35-year-old batter.

The Indian seamers found swing working for them under lights and the bowlers did a tremendous job in controlling it. Bhuvneshwar Kumar started the proceedings in great fashion as he removed the dangerous Jos Buttler in the very first over of the innings with an immaculate in-swinger.

The debutant Arshdeep Singh also impressed with his variations in the very first over and ended up with two wickets in his spell. Pandya put brakes on the England chase by picking three wickets in his first two overs. England were reduced to 36/4 after 6.1 overs and could never recover afterwards. Buttler and Men fell 50 runs short of India’s total in the end.

“Sometimes it does swing in the evenings and we wanted to utilize that. Both the new ball bowlers used the swing and stopped their batters. We were sloppy on the field. Those catches should have been taken. Pretty sure we will field pretty well in the coming games,” the leading run-scorer in T20 internationals further added.