England’s captain, Jos Buttler, is hopeful that his team can make a comeback in the second ODI, even though they were humiliated by India in the first ODI at The Oval on Tuesday. The keeper-batsman said that the home team shouldn’t worry because they still have a “super strength” in batting.
India’s swing bowling was so good that England’s batting lineup gave up and they were all out for 110 in just 25.2 overs. Jasprit Bumrah got six wickets while three of the top four English batters got ducks. Buttler scored the most runs with 30, and England got to 100 runs when it didn’t look like they would.
Buttler told Sky Sports after the game that England would learn from the loss and have faith in the players in the locker room to turn things around. He also said that their strength over the past few years has been the way they bat.
The English leader said: “We’ll try to learn as much as we can from it, but we’ll stick to what we know, and there’s a lot of faith in that locker room that the players are great. When you look at their names, you can see that they are some of the best players we’ve ever had, so there’s no reason to worry and not much time to think about it either. If I think back over the last five or six years, batting has been our biggest strength in this type of cricket.”
The bowling line-up for England couldn’t do as well as India’s, and the visitors got to the finish line in 18.4 overs. Rohit Sharma, who was on fire in the T20 series, hit an unbeaten 76 with six fours and five sixes off 58 balls.
“When we play on Thursday, we need to be positive, get back out there, and make things right.” – Jos Buttler
Buttler also said that days like this are hard to deal with, but he admitted that England wouldn’t be panicking and promised that they would come back strong.
He added: “You don’t want days like that to happen, and they don’t happen very often. But today is one of those days, and it’s hard to deal with. It’s important not to panic or look too deeply and find too many problems. India bowled very well, and we didn’t do as well as we would have liked against that.”
England also lost the three T20I game series that came before the 50-over games because of how they batted. On Thursday at Lord’s, they will want to get everything right.
