All-rounder Teja Nidamanuru pinpoints area Netherlands need to improve for upcoming clash against Sri Lanka
Oct 20, 2023
Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) [India], October 20 : Netherlands all-rounder Teja Nidamanuru pinpointed the area that the Dutch side need to improve as they gear up for their upcoming World Cup clash against Sri Lanka.
Both teams faced each other in the final of the World Cup Qualifiers earlier this year. The Dutch bowlers produced an exceptional performance to restrict the Lions to 233. However, they failed to live up to the expectations with the bat as they succumbed to a total of 105.
Nidamanuru pointed out that the batting department will be the one area they are working incredibly hard to prepare against Sri Lanka.
"Yeah, great question. Look I think If we assess those two games that we played against Sri Lanka, it's our batting department that probably didn't live up to the expectation that we needed to. I think in the final we played, we kept them down to a good score, we could have chased that, but obviously, their spin through the middle was something that troubled us," Nidamanuru said in the pre-match press conference.
The likes of Hasaranga, for example, and Theekshana have bowled really well against most batters in the world, but in those conditions where the ball was turning a little bit off the straight and it was tricky, but that's something that we've looked into and we've addressed and we've worked extremely hard on playing spin and being able to rotate strike through the middle a little bit better. So, I think that's a key area in the game that we need to do well to get a positive result against Sri Lanka in this game," Nidamanuru added.
The Netherlands would be backing themselves to pull off another victory after getting better of South Africa in their previous fixture. Their 38-run victory will arguably go down as the biggest upset ever in the history of the World Cup.
Nidamanuru talked about the mood in the camp after clinching a historic victory and said, "The mood in the camp is, I think the word that I would like to use is calm. Obviously, we're excited after the game and we celebrated it and we sat around and had a good conversation about the game. But we've come to the World Cup with a goal in our mind and I think our focus sort of quickly shifted to, okay, well, what's next and can we prepare? So, we travelled, we trained, we trained yesterday, we trained today and obviously we're ready to go for tomorrow morning. The mood is calm and quite a few of the guys are very determined because we lost twice to them at the qualifiers, and it's something that we want to put right for ourselves within our group."
The rematch between the World Cup Qualifiers finalists will take place on Friday, at the Ekana Sports City, Lucknow.