We want guys who will perform consistently: Steve Smith

Steve Smith the Australian captain has urged that the team needs the players who will perform consistently at the highest level. The visitors were trumped yet again by the rampant Indian side in Nagpur as they lost the series by 1-4. But the matches were closely fought unlike the scoreline suggests and Aussies could not seize the key moments. The only game they did that was in Bengaluru and they managed to get one past the hosts.

The final game of the series was the least competitive and Australia squandered a good position, not for the first time. On a slow wicket, Indian spinners strangled them and restricted on a meagre total of 242. In reply, they romped home comfortably powered by another century from Rohit Sharma. The only positive of the series for Smith and his men was their bowling which had India under the pump time and again.

Not converting words into action

Steve Smith warned his mates after the match by saying that they would now look for the performing players in the ongoing JLT One-Day Cup back home. “Some guys are back playing the domestic one-day domestic competition at the moment and yeah, there’re some guys there that can put some pressure on the guys that are here. Obviously the results haven’t been good enough and we want our guys to perform consistently. We will have a good look at the one day competition back home and hopefully a few guys can jump out of the pack and score big runs and bowl really well as well,” he said during the post-match presser.

He felt that the Indian skipper set some good fields on a slow wicket and the batsmen couldn’t adapt well enough. “We had a chat after our second game about the spinners, particularly hitting the ball down the ground and things like that and hitting the men in the deep and I thought we did that for a couple of games. But today, I thought Virat [Kohli] set some good fields and stopped us from hitting and I don’t think we adapted well enough. Today was probably a day to use softer hands and played a bit squarer and hit the balls into the gaps instead of hitting down the ground,” he added.

The 28-year-old also opined that they were not converting their words into action and the old grouse of set batsmen not going on to make big scores made a comeback. “The top four need to stand up and really take control. We did it in a couple of games, or last game in Bangalore in particular, but we’re not doing it consistently enough to go hard in the back end of the game and getting the partnerships in the middle. We’re just not taking our words out in the middle and doing it with action, unfortunately. We have glimpses of it, we play well in periods and then we get ourselves in trouble, probably from poor decision making under pressure, that’s probably what you’ve got to put it down to most of all. it’s something we need to improve on because it’s not good enough,” he said of his team’s performances.

The skipper himself was off-colour in this series as he could muster only 142 runs at 28.62. When asked about his own performance, he was honest in his assessment and said, “To be honest, I wasn’t feeling great at the start of the series, I wasn’t holding the bat the way I liked to and I was having a few issues there that I was working on. But I think I’ve slowly found a nice tempo which I’m after. I would have loved to score a lot more runs.”

“I’ve got myself in on a few occasions and not gone on to get the big runs that I previously have been. From that aspect, as the leader of the team, it’s been disappointing. But I guess sometimes that’s cricket. You have those periods where you’re not playing or getting the scores you really like. Something hopefully I can turn it around and hopefully contribute in the T20s,” Smith concluded hoping to do better in the T20I series.