England captain Jos Buttler said his team came “third in a two-horse race” in their drubbing by India at the Kia Oval, but insists there will be no panic stations.
Four of England’s star-studded top six recorded ducks as they were bowled out for just 110 on their way to a 10-wicket defeat. For India, Jasprit Bumrah starred with six for 19, then Rohit Sharma smashed an unbeaten 77.
Buttler has had a tricky start to the captaincy since taking over from Eoin Morgan a fortnight ago, losing the first two T20s against India, too.
Buttler was confident that his batting unit, which included Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow and Ben Stokes, would be back to its best promptly.
“It’s a really disappointing day and a tough loss to take,” he said.
“[The message is] certainly not to panic and look too much into it and try and find too many faults. India bowled fantastically well and we didn’t manage to deal with that as well as we’d have liked today.
“But certainly if I look back over the past sort of five, six years, our batting has been our super strength and in this form of the game, so you look at the names of the guys in there, they are some of the best players we’ve had. So certainly no need to panic at all. And there’s not much time to dwell on it either. So it will be a positive to get back out there and put things right on Thursday [at Lord’s].
“You certainly don’t want days like that to come and they come few and far between and today’s one of those days and it’s tough to take, but certainly we’ll try and learn from it as much as we can. But we’ll stick to what we know and there’s huge trust in that dressing room that there’s some brilliant players in there. So I look to see a response on Thursday.”
Buttler reflected that, with the ball swinging and Bumrah bowling superbly, England should have limited the damage to three powerplay wickets, rather than the five they lost.
“We would have wanted to bowl first as well,” he said. “Certainly didn’t see it being as big a toss maybe as it looks now. But, India credit to them they exposed those conditions fantastically well. It did more than we expected obviously.
“You usually would come in to a fantastic batting wicket at The Oval, you’re used to seeing some high scoring games here. So there’s certainly more movement than we’ve seen. But again, that was the conditions today and you know, there is something we could do better to try and come through that.
“It might be losing three wickets in the first 10 as opposed to five, with such a long batting line-up that we possess, would be a big gain today. So we just have to learn and learn quickly and it’s tough then for our bowlers who are coming out and striving for wickets and taking more risks than you would normally because you’re behind the game.”
