West Indies captain Darren Sammy said there was no need to press the panic button in the wake of the loss to India in the team’s opening match of the World Twenty20 championship.
The Caribbean side produced an insipid performance on Sunday at the Sher-e-Bangla Stadium to plunge to a disappointing seven-wicket loss to India, and stumble in the first hurdle of their title defence.
Chris Gayle struggled in his 34 off 33 balls while Lendl Simmons got 27, as West Indies were restricted to 129 for seven off their 20 overs.
India then paced their innings nicely to reach their target with two balls to spare, with opener Rohit Sharma (62 not out) and Virat Kohli (54) getting half-centuries.
“We just didn’t respond well enough to their spinners – round one goes to India. I have a strong feeling that we will meet again, so we are looking forward to that. They used the conditions quite well. It’s a fact that we just didn’t bat well. We didn’t bat well and we still got to 130,” Sammy said.
“We will take heart from that but we never kicked off in the innings. Simmons played some good blows in the late overs but apart from that we never really got those big overs we required…we didn’t get that big moment and we were always behind the eight-ball.”
He added: “It is no need for us to panic. We have three more first round games to go in the tournament against Bangladesh, Australia and Pakistan and we back ourselves to win all three and reach the semi-finals. We are here to defend our title and we will give our all.”
West Indies were nothing like the team that swept their two official warm-up matches against England and Sri Lanka. Their batsmen were shackled by the new ball seam duo of Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Mohammed Shami before left-arm spinner Ravi Jadeja (3-48) and Man-of-the-Match leg-spinner Amit Mishra (2-18) derailed the innings with incisive spells.
