Head coach of the Pakistan national team Grant Bradburn is optimistic that his team will profit from the reverse swing in the remaining 2023 ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup matches that are presently taking place in India.
Pakistan will exploit India’s ‘dog chewed’ ball at World Cup 2023
Australia and the Men in Green will play on Friday, October 20, at Bangalore’s Chinnaswamy Stadium. Prior to the game, Bradburn stated that the Indian circumstances cause the ball to become scratched quite easily.
“We have also had some wonderful insights about the venues too — the ball is scuffing up quite quickly and looks like it is dog chewed after about 20 overs. It obviously means the ball becomes a little bit softer, which makes it difficult to score in the later stages,” Bradburn told PCB Digital in the lead-up to the game.
“That also brings in more reverse [swing] which plays into our hands. So all of those elements are a good learning for us that we are taking on-board,” he added.
Bradburn also shed light on the crucial learnings from Pakistan’s defeat against India in Ahmedabad.
“There is always pressure on the team to win. When we do not, we critique our performances very, very closely and we’ve done that over the last couple of days, too. I think the experiences from Ahmedabad were fantastic,” he said.
“It was a great opportunity to learn and grow from the whole experience of playing in front of a very large, hostile crowd. It is unusual to play in front of a crowd, which is pretty much, you know, solely there for the opposition. However, it was nice to hear some silence as well at times when we were batting well.
“We had some really good honest conversations yesterday as a group talking about how we wanted to take the game on more and we did have an opportunity to be a little bit more assertive with the bat earlier on.
“As a result, we put ourselves under a little bit of pressure and then you know, we just didn’t get enough to really put pressure on in the second innings. That, however, doesn’t take away from the fact that as a group, we’ve also acknowledged that we didn’t put enough balls in good areas.”
