Dinesh Karthik: Dropped catches took game away from us

Put in to bat, India managed to post 190/6 but West Indian opener Evin Lewis smashed an unbeaten 125 off 62 balls with as many as 12 sixes and six fours to lead the Windies to victory in 18.3 overs. The southpaw was dropped by Mohammed Shami on 46 off Bhuvneshwar Kumar, and then on 55 by Karthik at long-off off Kuldeep Yadav. 

"If mis-hits go for sixes then you know it is his day but he gave us two chances, we couldn't hold on to them. Those were costly opportunities and in T20 games every opportunity would cost you a lot. We could see the result went their way mostly because of dropped chances," Karthik said at the post-match press conference, reported PTI.

Explaining why he failed to pouch the catch, Karthik said, “I am pretty confident taking high catches and fielding is something that comes naturally to me,” insisted Karthik. “I am very confident about my fielding abilities. It is just that I came running in but the breeze took it away slightly more than I thought. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw Virat (Kohli) running in as well. So I didn’t want to bump into him and that took a fraction of a second away from me, which made me run more than I should and that kind of didn’t get me into a good position. That’s the reason why I dropped the catch.”

But Karthik didn’t hold back his praise for Lewis, who scored his second century in T2OI cricket- both of them coming against India. 

He said, “On any given day, most teams would take 190. But the way that guy played, he hit more sixes than fours, so a lot of credit to Evin Lewis for the way he played,” offered Karthik. “It doesn’t happen too often that you end up hitting twice the number of sixes than you have boundaries. Goes to show that he was hitting the ball really well. He was targeting areas that he was confident about and he put away a lot of good balls for boundaries. So it was not too easy to bowl.

“He really took it on, played a lot of shots. You could see the other two guys who played around him (Chris Gayle and Marlon Samuels) didn’t really get going from ball one but he was striking the ball really well. Goes to show that it was a good wicket to bat on and he was putting away the bad balls for sixes and some of the good balls as well,” went on Karthik.

“He was hitting the ball long, it was one of those days where not much was done by us as a bowling unit but having said that, those kind of days happen in T20s.”