Cricket is a funny game but it can be cruel at times as well. Imagine a situation where a side like India, after losing two games in its group, was still mathematically alive in the qualification race until the last day of the league stage at the women’s T20 World Cup. But a side like England, with three wins out of four games, was pushed out the door and sent home for having one horrifyingly bad night on the field.
If one would have caught up with England head coach Jon Lewis after the loss to the West Indies away from any cameras or microphones, his words would have matched the utter disbelief on his face. At the press conference, he was as eloquent as he could possibly be after the shock ouster, but it had to sting. After so many months of preparation, hauling themselves to Abu Dhabi for acclimatisation, using wet balls, and tweaking lineups, it must hurt.
West Indies’ Aaliyah Alleyne, left, and Chinelle Henry celebrate their win against England. | Photo Credit: AP Photo/Altaf Qadri
“The reality of the situation is we didn’t play well enough today and got beat by a better side on the day. So, that’s sport and that’s World Cup sport and it’s a knockout game. So even though we’re in the group stages, it’s pretty much a quarterfinal. We knew that coming into the game. I don’t quite know how the net run rate works, but we knew we had to win the game, and we did perform as well as we could. So, we’ll dig into that and we’ll work out why that is, and we’ll try and move the team forward from there,” Lewis said after England’s six-wicket loss to the Windies at the Dubai International Stadium on Tuesday.
“I’m pretty gutted to be honest. We’ve worked incredibly hard over a long period of time working towards this point. We’ve put a lot of really good foundations into the team. We’ve grown our team over a long period of time. We’ve given lots of opportunities to lots of different people. We feel like we had a really good formula to come and play our best cricket out here but we haven’t done that today. And it’s really disappointing.
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“You put a lot of time and effort and thought into the process of getting to this point. Then you put the players out on the field and you want the players to go and play their best cricket, because you know that at their best, this group is a really good cricket team. And the bit that I suppose we didn’t quite get right today was maybe a little bit of our reacting to what the opposition were doing and obviously our execution of skill in the field. But we’ve got a really young bowling group and they’ll be better for this experience. Whilst they might not feel that now, I’m pretty sure they’ll come back stronger,” he added.
This was England’s first game in Dubai. The 2009 World T20 champion was based in Sharjah thus far and had found the dry and slow conditions there to be quite conducive to its impressive spin arsenal.
The side had not played in Dubai ever which meant it hadn’t trained under the infamous ‘Ring of Fire’ - the circular floodlights at this venue. The inexperience on the surface and at the venue was evident as all three departments underperformed, thereby costing the side a place in the knockouts.
“It’s the first time the girls have stepped into this stadium today. We haven’t had a chance to be in this stadium before, and I don’t like making excuses for what were reasonably straightforward chances that we should take nine times out of ten. You’ve got a wonderful fielder in Maia Bouchier who’s dropping balls there…missing balls. Sophia Dunkley is very safe under the high ball, as is Alice Capsey. Obviously, really distraught. We’ve been knocked out of a World Cup. It’s obviously something that’s been reasonably common at this stadium. For us to step into the stadium for the first time today has made it pretty tricky for some of the players out in the middle.”
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When it was pointed to him that India trained at the main ground in Sharjah ahead of its last group fixture , Lewis shrugged, “No one’s had an opportunity to train here. We’ve been training in the ICC Academy down the road. I didn’t know. India can pretty much do what they like.”
Venue managers at the ICC clarified that the option to train at Sharjah was open to all teams, with only India exercising the right ahead of their key group clash. New Zealand and West Indies are expected to do the same ahead of their semifinal bout.
England players react after the loss to West Indies. | Photo Credit: AP Photo/Altaf Qadri
Knight, Lewis and England will feel hard done by, after months of planning went down the drain due to three hours of poor cricket.
“Yeah, well, that’s the World Cup, isn’t it? It’s pretty brutal. So, it will take a bit of time. The players will be really reflective. We’ve got a really strong group. The group will stick together. That’s one thing they definitely will do. They work well together and they work for each other and they’ll support each other and the staff will rally around them and support them as best we can,” he said.
“Heather would just be really frustrated because she cares so much about English cricket and this team. But again, I suppose it showed how much we missed her with her not being out there because I think she might well have been able to help the bowlers in particular a little bit more than Nat was able to in that situation. But that comes with experience and she’s got a lot of experience as a captain and it’s a pretty tough job at times. As you saw there at the end of the game, she fronts up and does the interviews and that’s quite a hard thing for her to do when she’s not been able to be out there and participate as fully as she can. And you think actually, if she continued when she was batting, maybe we might have got 10 or 15 more. It might have been a tougher chase for the West Indies, but they played some really, really good cricket tonight.”
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