Press Trust of india
Mumbai, March 30: West Indies captain Darren Sammy insisted Wednesday that his side would be no pushovers in the World Twenty20 semifinal clash Thursday against India even though it seems like a ‘David vs Goliath contest’.
“I think it is 80-20 to India, but people tend to forget David won the fight, so it’s something similar to that,” said Sammy. “We haven’t played the perfect game yet. We are stressing on rotation of strike. It is clear that we are a big boundary-hitting team. But then T20 is not about hitting boundaries only,” he added.
Although Sammy admitted that Virat Kohli would be a big factor in Thursday’s game, but having the world’s ‘best T20 batsman’ in Chris Gayle does even out the scales to an extent.
“…have you ever heard of Chris Gayle?” he asked in jest when asked about Kohli. “There’s no taking away from Virat, he’s a very good player, but like I’ve said in my press conferences, we tend to focus on what we could do, in our dressing room. It’s going to be a hell of a game, it’s going to be 15 West Indies players versus 33,000, plus billions of Indians on TV. It’s a challenge we’re ready to face,” asserted the amiable West Indian skipper.
In the run-up to the World T20, the West Indies players had a pay dispute with their cricket board, which was resolved just in time, but Sammy said there was a total lack of support for his team from the region’s cricket authorities.
“The lack of respect for our T20 team, a lot has been said about this team and us as a group. But it just brought us closer together,” informed the 34-year-old.