TAUNTON, England, CMC – Chedean Nation has pushed back on suggestions West Indies women were overawed by the occasion, in their heavy eight-wicket defeat to reigning champions Australia Women here yesterday.
And she is confident the Caribbean side will bounce back when they face India Women in their next game here Thursday.
“It wasn’t stage fright. We’ve been here before. We know what we’re about,” Jamaican Nation told a media conference here.
“It was just one of those games and we will bounce back from that. All in all, the girls saw where they went wrong and we’ll go back to the drawing board in training tomorrow and work on our mistakes.”
The Caribbean side are hardly new to the world stage, having reached the final of the last 50-overs World Cup four years ago before lifting the Twenty20 World Cup in India last year by beating Australia in the final.
However, they found themselves completely dominated on Monday, restricted to 204 all out and then having little or no impact with the ball as the Aussies raced to their target courtesy of opener Nicole Bolton’s unbeaten 107.
Several Windies batsmen got starts but failed to carry on as Hayley Matthews top-scored with 46, captain Stafanie Taylor got 45, Nation scored 39 and Deandra Dottin, 29.
“It wasn’t so difficult batting. It was a good wicket to bat on. I think we just didn’t rotate the strike enough,” Nation explained.
“We saw how the Australians batted up front. They rotated the strike and were a bit more positive than we were.
“I think the Aussies were bowling really good. They were bowling really straight at us and it was kind of difficult to get singles at that point in time.”
West Indies have had a rough build-up to the tournament, losing three preparation matches and two official warm-up games, to be winless since arriving in England almost a month ago.
But Nation said the squad would be seeking to tighten up on their weak areas in coming days and produce a better showing going forward.
“I think everybody have learned a lot since we’ve been here preparing for this,” she noted.
“We know we have work to do but the girls are working really hard in the nets and as I said before it’s just unfortunate we ended up on the losing side today but we’ll bounce back for sure against India coming up in the next game.”
She added: “[We need to focus on] partnerships. We need to get more partnerships like we saw the Australians got one big partnership at the top but unfortunately we didn’t capitalise on our partnerships.”
