Amid the clouds of doubts regarding the death bowling, Indian captain Rohit Sharma has opened up about senior pacer Bhuvneshwar Kumar and latest sensation Harshal Patel‘s poor show with the ball and has backed both pacers to rediscover their lost mojo.
Notably, the Men in Blue have been troubled by Bhuvneshwar’s poor performances in the death overs – an area where Bhuvi had a firm grip for many years. Particularly, his poor show in the 19th over has been worrying for India as he conceded 19 against Pakistan and 14 against Sri Lanka in the Asia Cup 2022, while he gave away 16 in the opening T20I against Australia in Mohali.
Following this, Rohit didn’t give the 19th over to Bhuvneshwar in the recently-concluded third T20I in Hyderabad, and instead, the right-armer delivered the 18th over. However, Bhuvi was still taken to the cleaners as he went for 21 runs, but Rohit has kept his faith in the veteran Indian pacer.
“It’s important we give him that space. Because when you have a guy like him in the team and the quality he brings, we know that he’s had more good days than bad days, honestly speaking, in the last so many years we’ve seen. Yes, of late, it’s been not the kind of performance that he would want, but that can happen to any of the bowlers,” said Rohit in the presser after 3rd T20I.
“You can see the opposition as well, it’s not easy to bowl at the death. But we’ve been working on some execution plans, and hopefully, we can give him more options to bowl in the death and then he’ll be as good as he was before. I don’t think he’s short in confidence, whenever I speak to him, the confidence is there, you can have bad games, but it’s important to come back from that, and we want him to come back as quickly as possible because he’s bowled those difficult overs for us in the past,” he added.
Similarly, with terrible figures of 0/49 (1st T20I), 0/32 (2nd T20I) and 1/18 (3rd T20I), Harshal’s return to the T20I outfit has been quite disappointing. Not to mention, the right-arm pacer made it to the India side on the grounds of his death-overs expertise, but he was not at all impressive in the just-concluded T20I leg against the Aussies. Despite that, captain Rohit is not too worried and mentioned the team management has a belief that the pacer will come back strongly.
“Coming back from an injury is never easy. He missed cricket for close to two months. Whenever bowlers go through an injury phase and come back, it’s never easy, so we’ve not really judged him on how he has performed in these three games because we know his quality. He has bowled some tough overs for us in the past and also for his franchise. We believe in his quality, whatever he has as a bowler. It’s important to keep showing that faith, and I’m pretty sure he’s also trying to rectify those mistakes. He’s working hard on his bowling,” Rohit added further.
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