Dubai, Oct 30 (IANS): New Zealand pacer Trent Boult believes that having a good grip on the ball and accuracy will be the key in combating dew if New Zealand are asked to bowl second in their Group 2 match of the ICC Men's T20 World Cup against India in Dubai on Sunday.
Both India and New Zealand are looking to open their account in the ongoing tournament after losing their opening matches to Pakistan and keep themselves in the hunt for a spot in the semi-finals.
Sunday's match will take place in Dubai, a venue where chasing teams have won all five matches with dew coming into second innings as an uncontrollable element, barring South Africa's win over West Indies, coming in a day match.
"I suppose it's a hard one to understand how much dew is going to come in. But from the one game we've experienced so far, there hasn't been too much of it, the overheat conditions. It cooled down a lot nicely. So you've just got to, I suppose, take your time and make sure you've got a good grip on the ball and just be as accurate as you can," Boult said while responding to a query from IANS in the pre-match press conference on Saturday.
In India's opening match against Pakistan, the dew taking effect in the second innings meant that the bowlers weren't able to grip the ball well and were easily taken to the cleaners by Pakistan's opening pair of Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan. The appearance of dew in the later stage of the match has thrown a spanner in the plans of many teams. It also makes the toss an important part in deciding the match, something which India captain Virat Kohli stressed upon in his pre-match press interaction.
"It will continue to be a big factor. That's the nature of this tournament. You can look at this situation in two ways. Either you can bank too much on the toss or you can challenge yourself as a team to say, okay, even if we lose the toss, we're good enough to bowl or bat in any conditions. And that should be the attitude because you don't have time in the shortest format of the game to think too much about what happened at the toss. The game goes away from you pretty quickly in two or three overs in the whole course of the game, as we saw in the last game as well," remarked Kohli.
It seems that both India and New Zealand will have to adapt to the dew factor coming later in the match, depending on who bowls second.