Veteran Australian batter Matt Renshaw didn’t blame the slow R Premadasa Stadium pitch for their 23-run defeat to Zimbabwe in the T20 World Cup, saying that the teams from the sub-continent who travel to Australia never complain about pace and bounce as well.
“I think that’s just the nature of cricket. You get a sub-continent team come to Australia and you don’t get them complaining about the bounce or the pace,” Renshaw said at post-match press conference. “It’s just the way that cricket is nowadays. You’ve got to be able to go through different surfaces.”
“Yes, the wickets in Australia during Big Bash are quite true – they get a lot of bounce. You go to India, and if in the other side of the tournament, there’s different wickets, there’s probably higher scores, shorter boundaries. The boundaries here (Premadasa) are quite big so it’s just cricket. But yeah, it’s probably just trying to adjust the conditions as well as we can so that when we get to these conditions we know what the game plan is, we know how we get best suited.” Renshaw again said.
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He further applauded Zimbabwean bowlers for sticking to their game plan, and scoring a 170-run target was challenging.
“Yeah, probably makes it quite tough to chase 170 out there. They bowled really well at the start, took some early wickets, and felt like every time we built some momentum that partnership with Maxi (Glenn Maxwell) was obviously important but couldn’t get enough momentum in there to chase that down and it was just too many to knock.”
“Probably Marcus Stoinis was going to bat higher, he got that hit on the finger, we don’t know how bad it is, I’m sure the medical staff will treat that, but yeah that was the one today but yeah we just weren’t good enough today. They played really well, they batted really well, got 170 on the board, had wickets in hand to launch at the end and took early wickets. So it’s always tough in a T20 when that happens,” Matt Renshaw concluded.
