Kensington, June 10 (IANS): Tim Paine has called out England captain Jos Buttler for making lots of brain fades during his team’s 36-run defeat to Australia in the T20 World Cup match, which meant that the defending champions are staring at an early exit from the competition.
At the Kensington Oval, Australia posted 201/7, before leg-spinner Adam Zampa took 2-28 off his four overs to seal a 36-run win over a sloppy England. Paine, the former Australia Test captain, thinks Buttler got it wrong from electing to bowl first.
"Everyone’s been talking about the fact these conditions are really hard to play in, they’re only going to get harder as the game goes on. To say they won the toss and bowled because there was a short boundary and the wind was blowing that way… was the boundary going to get shorter as the game went on?
"It’s a World Cup game and conditions that you know are going to get harder to play in… you have to bat first. You’ve got to bat first, I don’t care how small the boundary is, that wicket was going to get harder to bat on, that’s the first thing. Win the toss and bat first on that pitch, in my opinion," said Paine on SEN Radio.
He was also left baffled at the decision to bowl Will Jacks in Australia’s second over, where the part-time off-spinner was carted for 22 runs by openers, David Warner and Travis Head, targeting the shorter boundary consistently. After the game ended, Buttler admitted his "gut call" to bowl Jacks in the second over was a mistake.
"Secondly, if you’re going to win the toss and bowl, in a huge World Cup game against your archrival, set the tone at the start of the game. If you went through the Australia batting lineup before that game and said, ‘who do you want to face first boys’, every single one of those batters in the top seven would have said, ‘give me some spin before I have to face Jofra (Archer) and (Mark) Wood’, who both bowl 150ks.”
"They went with Moeen Ali, their front-line spinner. The second over, they went with Will Jacks, their part-timer. That is an absolute brain fade. I don’t care what the boundary is or what the wind is doing, you don’t bowl two overs of off-spin to David Warner and Travis Head.”
"You’re giving them 12 balls of a cider before you bring on your guys who bowl 150 kilometres an hour. Then Wood comes on and goes for 20 (in is first over), because Warner has had a look, his nerves have settled, he’s adjusted to the environment around him and taken Wood down. You give one of Wood or Archer the first over of the game and you set the tone straight up," he elaborated.
England now need to have huge victories over Namibia and Oman in their remaining Group B matches to give themselves the best chance of entering Super Eight and need Scotland to lose to Australia if they are to avoid an early exit from the competition.