HOBART, Tasmania, CMC – With West Indies’ backs against the wall and needing a win over Zimbabwe to keep their hopes of advancing in the ICC Twenty20 World Cup alive today, all-rounder Jason Holder says he has “no doubt” that is attainable.
“It’s more or less us just hitting the ground running against Zimbabwe and starting that game well and beating them,” he said yesterday, ahead of the must-win game here, a day after an embarrassing defeat to Scotland in their Group B opener of the Twenty20 World Cup qualifiers.
West Indies shockingly collapsed to 118 all out in the penultimate over, in pursuit of 161 for victory, and eventually went down by 42 runs.
It was not the start the team was hoping for, Holder admitted in a pre-match media conference yesterday, but he said fans should not count the West Indies out because of that loss.
“Obviously, we had a tough start yesterday,” he said.
“We’re all disappointed with the performance that we had yesterday but I think the most important thing for us to do is to come together even tighter and try to find solutions. We had a pretty good chat after the game and I’m sure guys went into their rooms and reflected on the performance yesterday, and, no doubt, I think we have what it takes to turn it around.”
Among the solutions Holder pointed to was batsmen being more “situation aware”.
“We obviously didn’t bat well yesterday and we probably let ourselves down with the bat in the recent past. I think we just gotta be a little bit more situation aware and try to build partnerships. Partnership is the key in any cricket game.
“The situation of the game will determine how we play. If that requires that we go for boundaries then we look for boundaries but if it requires that we have to knock it around for a bit… then we’ve gotta make the adjustment and then knock it around. I think it’s that simple and we just need to understand what is required of us when we go out to bat,” Holder said.
The former Windies captain said, however, that he did not expect the Caribbean side’s opponents to be a walkover today. On the same day that West Indies registered an opening loss, Zimbabwe scored a 31-run win over Ireland in their first game.
Holder said he was expecting them to be similarly competitive against West Indies.
“They’re a very good cricket team. We’ve played against them quite a bit in the recent past and they’ve been more and more competitive, and they seem to be on a nice winning streak as well so we expect a highly competitive game – probably one of the toughest games that we’re gonna have here in the competition,” he said.
This will be the fourth meeting between the two teams in T20Is, with West Indies winning two of those. The last meeting between them in the format was in 2013 in Antigua where West Indies won by 41 runs. Today’s match is scheduled to start at 4 a.m. Eastern Caribbean (3 a.m. Jamaica).
