New Zealand skipper Sophie Devine refused to blame Decision Review System(DRS) which played an important factor in Kiwis loss In the first T20 against Australia in Brisbane. The visitors skipper said that her team has to reflect on the mistakes they committed in the first match and make sure that they don’t repeat the same mistake again in the upcoming encounter which will be held on Sunday.
The absence of DRS, which is currently being used in the England-West Indies series, came to the fore in the 14th over of Australia’s innings when Nicola Carey clearly edged Devine but was given not out on the field and the non striker Ashleigh Gardner knew that Carey edged the ball if the decision was given in the favor of New Zealand things could have been different and Australia would have lost their sixth wicket on 82 runs.
It would have added pressure on Gardener to play in a different manner while Devine came out to bat she was again on the receiving end of a very marginal stumping decision although that would not have been changed by the presence of DRS.
“If the technology is available across the series then absolutely [we’d like it], but we know there’s no DRS this series so we’ll just have to live with it,” Devine said. “We have full trust and faith in the umpires. They’ll make mistakes, just like us players do.
“We also know there’s an extreme cost that comes with [DRS] and we all know [in] the current situation that purse strings are probably a little bit tighter. We can’t look to DRS to save our hinds. We’ve just got to be better, can’t finger point anywhere but ourselves. The Australian side was clinical and got the job done.
“We’ll have to take a long, hard look at ourselves in the mirror tonight because it wasn’t good enough. We should have won that game. It’s frustrating. In the field I thought we were poor: we missed a lot of simple ground balls that nine times out of 10 we’d collect those. We can’t use the excuse that we haven’t played in a while” she added.
Gardener played an outstanding knock of 61 runs from 41 balls as she didn’t received much support from other batswoman as rest of the players struggled to time the ball properly. Australia will become much stronger squad if Perry makes a comeback in the second match as the ace all-rounder is recovering from her injury which she faced during 2019 World Cup.
However Gardener was happy that her knock helped her team to register the victory against Kiwis and she said that she wanted to settle in the beginning as they have not played cricket for quite some time now once she was set then she knew that she can accelerate her innings from now on which she did successfully in the end and gave Australia a fighting total to defend against mighty New Zealand.
