New Delhi: It was yet another semifinal exit from a big ICC event for New Zealand, but skipper Kane Williamson refused to call it a “jinx”, saying that the loss to England in the World Twenty20 last-four stage was just a case of going down to a better team on the given day.
New Zealand finished their group engagements unbeaten and were being seen as top contenders for the title after adapting superbly to the conditions.
However, the Kiwis were bowed out rather timidly, going down by seven wickets in the first semi-final against England.
“Not really (on whether New Zealand were battling a jinx),” said Williamson.
“Every cricket game you play, you look at it as an isolated event. You turn up to play your best cricket but sometimes the other team play better and you come second. That is what happened to us today. We played a semi-final not so long ago, we went alright there. We came first in that one (against South Africa in World Cup). That is just cricket,” he said.
Williamson said New Zealand, who lost six semi-finals before making the final of the ODI World Cup last year, will take back plenty of positives.
Williamson felt they were 25 runs short and the game changed in the last five overs of their innings where they lost five wickets for 32 runs to end at 153/8.
“I think we got off to a good start. We were probably 25 runs short and England bowled really well in the death period which made it really difficult for us.”
New Zealand media rue loss to England
New Zealand media have likened Eoin Morgan’s England team to Frankenstein’s monster, saying they turned the Black Caps’ own game plan against them to win the World Twenty20 semi-final.
While acknowledging England were the better team and deserved the seven-wicket win in the semis, Kiwi pundits said the seeds of the result were sown when the sides met in Wellington last year at the Cricket World Cup.
In that match, eventual finalists New Zealand trounced England by eight wickets, prompting Morgan’s men to review their style and emulate the Black Caps’ aggressive tactics.
“There was an element of Frankenstein to New Zealand’s departure from the Twenty20 World Cup,” Fairfax New Zealand’s Duncan Johnstone wrote.
“This was an England team that the Black Caps turned into a monster. And the monster came back to destroy them.”
The New Zealand Herald’s said England also mimicked the Black Caps by taking the emotion out of their cricket, delivering “a clinical dissection which wouldn’t have looked amiss in an operating theatre”.
“If the Black Caps could be deemed ‘the masters’, their apprentices trumped them,” he wrote. He added that “England have morphed into a side with swagger and chutzpah”, since their Wellington humiliation, rating them a good chance of winning the decider on Sunday against either India or the West Indies.
Johnstone said the heavy loss was a “limp” end to a campaign that saw the Black Caps cruise through the group stages undefeated. The New Zealanders have shown they can advance deep into limited-overs tournaments but are yet to reach the next level.
