India registered their first loss of the series against New Zealand in the 4th T20I at the ACA-VDCA Stadium in Visakhapatnam by a margin of 50 runs.
This was their first loss after they had already won the series by sealing victory in the first three matches of the series. The reason for this loss has been pin pointed to a strange playing XI that India played in the game. Ishan Kishan suffered a niggle and was not replaced by another batter, but by Arshdeep Singh. Therefore, India played with just 6 batters and five bowlers. After the match, captain Suryakumar Yadav explained the rationale behind this bizarre decision.
Speaking after the game, Suryakumar Yadav said that India fielded six batters on purpose. They wanted to go with five perfect bowlers and wanted to see what would happen if they went two or three down and had to chase down a big target. Hence, they played with a batsman less.
“I feel we purposely played six batters today. We wanted to have five perfect bowlers and wanted to challenge ourselves. Like for example, if we’re chasing 200 or 180, and we wanted to see if we were two down or three down, how does it look? But then it’s fine at the end of the day. And we wanted to play all the players who are part of the World Cup squad. Otherwise, we would have played other ones,” the Indian captain said.
India could only afford to do this experiment because they had already sealed the series.
New Zealand Defeat India By 50 Runs
New Zealand started off the innings with a bang, as openers for the opening wicket. Seifert went on to score 62 runs. They lost their way somewhat in the middle with a quick flurry of wickets. Ultimately, a late charge from Daryl Mitchell, pushed the Kiwis to a big score of 215 at the end of the 20 overs.
The New Zealand bowlers were always on top of India, as they picked up wickets at regular intervals. The only bog scare was provided by Shivam Dube who played a sensational knock of 65 runs from 23 deliveries. However, this was not enough as India were bundled out for 165. Mitchell Santner was the pick of the bowlers, picking up 3 wickets.