NEWS
Follow UsThe Netherlands had to swallow the bitter pill of a massive defeat yesterday when an on-the-rise Australian team pulverised them by 309 runs at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi. Except for their win against South Africa in Dharamshala and a spirited performance in a defeat against Pakistan in Hyderabad, the Dutch team has failed to create an impact in the World Cup with consistent performances.
Speaking to the media in the post-match press conference, Netherlands coach Ryan Cook dwelled on the ups and downs of the Dutch World Cup campaign so far.
“...it's been a bit of a roller coaster the last couple of weeks or so, but no, you know, the guys are experiencing things that are new, they're experiencing things that are different. I think all of us are, even as the coaching staff. These things are coming at us thick and fast and we've got to find a way to be able to deal with them. The team prides themselves on great resilience. They pride themselves on sort of taking ownership and learning going forward. So, we hope to keep getting better and progressing for every game that we play. And if this experience will serve us, maybe not only in this tournament, but going forward, that'll be really good for us.”
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On being asked about what a new team like the Netherlands can learn from this loss, Coach Cook remarked -
“Yeah, I think it's great to compete against the best teams in the world. You get to play against some of the best players in the world. You have a whole lot of experience at these types of venues, in these types of matches and some of our players obviously don't have any of that experience.
We sort of see the way that they go about things and see which things we can learn from them. There might be some sort of bigger things and also some smaller details that I think all the guys in the change room and during our debriefs, we also sort of mentioned a lot of the things that we're seeing from the other teams and how we can take those into our own game and how does that fit for us. But you know we've got our own strengths that we also try and double down on and that's what we can do and we try and do those things that are in our control as much as possible but definitely take some lessons along the way.”
The Netherlands were chasing a mammoth target of 400, something they haven’t done in the past. Speaking on the talks in the dressing post the first innings, Cook said,
“Obviously, it’s not easy to chase 400 at any venue, but we’ve chased some big scores before, so we’ve used some templates about how we want to do about it, and we do train for those types of things. We just said to the guys you get good value for shots here, the wicket seemed to be a good wicket and you know if we can get ourselves off to a good start hopefully get sort of half their score by 30 overs. We can really make a push on towards the end. Obviously, we didn't even bat half the overs, so that didn't go to plan.”
Post the defeat in Delhi, the Netherlands are travelling to Kolkata, where they will face Bangladesh on October 28th. Cook was clear in his team plans regarding preparations for that game after a short turnaround time between the two games.
“Yeah, we're very consistent in the way that we debrief games and then obviously prepare for the next game. We'll be doing, obviously, all of our research on Bangladesh and Kolkata, the venue. But obviously, taking the learnings from this game, because there's lots of stuff, as I mentioned, to learn. And we'll go through that stringently and make sure we go down into the detail of that and come back stronger having learned those lessons, hopefully for the next couple of games to come.”
