Despite the Indian team losing both its Asia Cup Super Four games — to Pakistan and Sri Lanka, skipper Rohit Sharma is confident his side is 90 per cent settled as it prepares for the upcoming ICC T20 World Cup in Australia later this year.
On Tuesday night, the Men in Blue lost a thrilling affair to Sri Lanka at the Dubai International Stadium. The loss also saw the Indian team being virtually out of the race of the Finals barring a miracle, which is next to impossible, could help them enter the summit clash.
“We are 90 per cent settled; only a few changes will happen,” said Sharma in the post-match press conference.
“We don’t have any shortcomings. There is quality in the team. There is more pressure in multi-nation series as compared to bilateral series. We have discussed this. it’s unfortunate that we couldn’t get past the group stages of the T20 World Cup (in the UAE 2021) and now we lost two matches in the Asia Cup Super Four,” he added.
“We are not worried after losing two matches back to back. We have won so many matches after the 2021 T20 World Cup,” he added.
Commenting on the defeat, Rohit said: “We didn’t score as many runs as we wanted to in the first six overs because we lost wickets. We should have capitalised better from the momentum we got after that.
“We couldn’t close the game properly with the bat. We had spoken about this in the team meeting… about how nicely we have dealt with in close matches. These things happen. We were 10 or 12 runs short but we still had a good score,” he was quoted as saying by ICC.
On picking Rishabh Pant over finisher Dinesh Karthik in the Playing XI, Rohit said, “Very simple, we just wanted a left-hander to bat in the middle, that’s why (he) is out. He is not out because of any form or anything, we wanted a left-hander to bat in the middle and take the pressure off of some of our batsmen who are batting with that left-hander.”