Dubai: To Shane Watson, on the dual-paced pitch at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium on Wednesday, Ravindra Jadeja was always going to be the danger man for his batsmen. “He bowled wicket taking balls. There is no doubt that when Jadeja is bowling on a wicket that turns a little bit and holds a little bit, he’s extremely dangerous,” said Watson after the seven run loss to Chennai Super Kings in their Pepsi IPL 2014 game.
“If the ball slides down, it makes him a little bit easy to play. Tonight the ball held up and that’s how the majority of us got out. He’s highly skilful when the ball is turning a little bit and he showed it tonight.” Watson pulled no punches when talking about the failure of his batsmen, accepting a lion’s share of the blame himself. “The batting performance is just extremely disappointing,” he admitted.
“I’ll certainly take a huge amount of the blame for that performance. What we needed was one stand through that middle period or at the start to be able to just get us home, and unfortunately that didn’t happen,” he said. Watson took the blame on himself. “I am certainly one of the main culprits there. It’s part of my job batting at No. 4, the most experienced player and the leader as well, to get us through, and it certainly wasn’t good enough,” he said.
Unfortunately, some of the decisions that we made at times with the bat just weren’t the right ones at that time. That’s something we will certainly learn from. We will not make the same mistakes again. I know everyone’s hurting about the way we batted. It’s a big learning curve for us,” the Australian allrounder added.
