Zimbabwe captain Craig Ervine was proud of the way his team fought throughout the T20 World Cup 2022 after their 71-run loss against India at the SCG, Sydney on Sunday. Zimbabwe was able to stun Pakistan in the Super 12 stage by one run and it was their best result of the tournament.
However, they were beaten by the Netherlands, which was a disappointing result for them. Earlier in the tournament, Zimbabwe qualified for the Super 12 after topping Group B. They lost to the West Indies but registered wins against Scotland and Ireland to make it to the next stage of the competition.
Meanwhile, Ervine believes the team didn’t play fearless cricket in the last few matches and it led to their downfall. Zimbabwe was dominated by India after Men in Blue posted a par score of 186 runs on the board after Rohit Sharma elected to bat first.
KL Rahul scored 51 runs off 35 balls while Suryakumar Yadav smashed 61 runs off just 25 balls to help their team get past the 180-run mark. The Zimbabwean bowlers were not able to stem the flow of runs and SKY was at his best.
On the other hand, Ryan Burl scored 35 while Sikander Raza added 34 runs but the rest of the Zimbabwean batters failed to make any significant contribution with the bat.
Craig Ervine said in the post-match presentation, “We could have changed a couple of plans, Surya did extremely well in the back end and countered Richie’s (Ngarava) wide yorkers. We could have taken pace off the ball there. Credit to him, he came out and changed the game. Leading into the tournament, we had some positivity upfront with the bat. The last couple of games, we went away from that fearless cricket and we went into our shells a little bit. If you just stand there and let it swing, there’s a good chance that you’re gonna nick off or get bowled. You need to be more proactive. Our last few results didn’t go as planned. We did good work to get into the Super 12s. We’ll be building on that. We fielded really well, especially catching. The boys fought really hard throughout the World Cup.”
Zimbabwe would have been disappointed as they were not able to keep up the momentum after winning against Pakistan.
