Kane Williamson has been through a lean patch of form for a while. He hasn’t been able to play at his fluent best in any of the formats for New Zealand. The entire cricket community likes a batter like Williamson, but people are now running out of patience.
In this tournament, he has scored 71 runs at a strike rate of under 100. It just seems that the captain’s unable to find form in this tournament.
In the previous game against England, he played 40 balls and scored 40 runs. People started criticising him for his approach during the chase, given that all the pressure was on batters like Glenn Phillips, James Neesham and Daryl Mitchell to score aggressively. Ultimately, they lost the game by 20 runs.
Fellow teammate Mitchell Santner has defended their captain’s approach in this tournament. He felt that the England bowlers should be credited for Williamson’s inability to find a rhythm. He said:
“I think it’s the way England bowled. They bowled very well through the middle there. The spinners bowled very well at Kane. If you look at the partnership, Glenn [Phillips] was going pretty good, and Kane was kind of, like you said, playing the anchor.
“We got ourselves into a good position five or six (overs) out, and I think there was a couple of quality overs from Sam Curran and Chris Woakes that took it away from us in the end.”
Kane Williamson has shown everyone that he will always come through for the team. Even in the previous edition of the world cup, he had the best outing with the bat but came to the finals; he stood up for the team.
New Zealand will be hoping that his match-winning knocks aren’t too far, given how close the semi-finals are.
“We did kind of leave it late” – Mitchell Santer
All-rounder Mitchell Santner also spoke about where they might have lost the game. He reckoned that they left it too late, which cost them the game at the end. He concluded saying:
“We did kind of leave it late, but we had wickets in hand to kind of try to make a surge at the end, I guess, once he got out. Then I think Neesham, and a few cutters and stuff made it quite hard to score, and it kind of got away from us. I think, if you look at the position we kind of got ourselves in was a good one. I guess the run rate might have been at 12s, but we still had a few wickets in the tank.”
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