Dinesh Karthik, who top-scored for India in the loss to West Indies on Sunday, said dropped catches cost the team in a big way.
In the sixth over, Ewin Lewis' lofted straight drive off Bhuvneshwar Kumar could not be taken due to a mix-up betweenen skipper Virat Kohli and Mohammad Shami. Then, Lewis got another reprieve as he heaved at a Kuldeep Yadav delivery, but Karthik, at long-off, couldn't take the chance.
"If mis-hits go for sixes then you know it is his day but he gave us two chances, we couldn't hold on to them. Those were costly opportunities and in T20 games every opportunity would cost you a lot. We could see the result went their way mostly because of dropped chances," Karthik said at the post-match press conference.
On his own dropped catch, Karthik explained, "I am pretty confident of taking high catches in fielding. It is just that I came running in and the breeze took it away slightly more than I thought and from the corner of my eyes I saw Virat running in as well.
"I didn't want to bump into him and that took a fraction of second for me which made me run more than I should and that kind of didn't get me in good position and that's is the reason I dropped the catch," he said.
Despite the loss, Karthik maintained 190 was a good score. "All said and done, 190 is a good score. On any given day most teams will take 190. But the way the guy played, he hit more sixes than fours. It doesn't happen too many times that you end up hitting twice the number of sixes than boundaries," he said.
"It goes to show he was hitting the ball really well. He was targeting areas that we were confident about. Lot of good balls, he was hitting for boundaries, so it is not easy to bowl. It was one of those days when not much was done by us as a bowling unit but those kind of days happen in T20," he added.
--By A Cricket Correspondent
