Campaigning in the Super 8s, Pandya played a crucial role by scoring a half-century and taking a wicket, leading India to a 50-run victory.
Indian skipper Rohit Sharma praised Pandya’s contributions, affirming that his batting consistently strengthens the team.
Pandya became the first Indian No. 6 to score a half-century in a T20 World Cup game. In the tournament so far, he has scored 89 runs with a strike rate of 141 and taken eight wickets.
“I mentioned in the last game as well, his batting well puts us in a good stead. We want to finish well and Hardik being Hardik we know what he is capable of,” Rohit said at the post-match presentation ceremony.
“He is a very important player for us, if he can keep doing that, it will put us in good positions,” said the skipper.
On the day of the match, other Indian batters also made significant contributions with Virat Kohli scoring 37, Rishabh Pant adding 36, and Shivam Dube hitting 34. Rohit Sharma himself set an aggressive tone with 23 runs off 11 balls.
“I have been talking about this for a long time now. It’s about going there and putting that into work. Considering everything we played really well, adapted to the conditions,” he said.
“All eight batters need to play their role, whatever it is. We saw one guy get 50 and we got 197, in T20 I don’t believe we need to get fifties and hundreds, what matters is the pressure you put on the bowlers.
“All the batters from the word go played well and that’s how we want to play as well. There is a lot of experience in the squad and we back them,” he said about the perfect execution of the game plan.
Rohit also acknowledged that the breeze plays a role in many Caribbean islands.
“There’s a little bit of wind factor here, overall we are very smart, overall we were good with bat and ball.”
Bangladesh skipper Najmul Hossain Shanto admitted that his team allowed at least 30 more runs than what should have been the par-score.
“We were thinking about 160-170 when we put them into bat, but they batted well so credit to them.”
He mentioned that the team lacked the required intent.
“We did not show as much intent as we needed with the bat, when we were chasing 190, we needed to show more intent especially in the first six (overs).”
