Australia skipper Steve Smith lamented that it’s become a trend for his side to get closer to winning games and end up losing them
Australia skipper Steve Smith has described Jasprit Bumrah and Bhuvneshwar Kumar as the best death bowlers around.
His assessment came after Australia suffered a five-wicket defeat to India in the third One-Day International between the teams in Indore on Sunday.
Opener Aaron Finch (124) had propelled Australia to 242-2 in 38 overs with a fiery century, but the visitors struggled to score briskly in slog overs and settled for 293 for 6.
India went on to overhaul the target without fuss and take an unassailable 3-0 lead in the five-match ODI series.
"I think a mixture of guys making probably the wrong decisions on the wrong balls. Also, some pretty well-executed bowling. I think Bumrah and Bhuvi are probably two of the best death bowlers going around, particularly when the wicket sort of slows up a little bit as it did," a dejected Smith said after the match.
"We still need to find a way. We set a template really well. The first 38 overs were magnificent. We set it up and we just weren't able to execute it in the back end."
Bumrah and Bhuvneshwar never allowed the Australian batsmen to score freely despite them having the opportunity to play aggressive cricket.
Smith said it’s become a "trend" for his side to get closer to winning games and end up losing them.
"We are quite often getting ourselves in good positions but not taking advantage of those. Today was no different, first 30 overs. We continually address it. It’s just hard to put your finger on it what we are actually doing or not doing to get the results we are after. Today, it was about execution," he said.
Australia’s captain admitted that it indeed becomes hard to motivate the team after such defeats.
"It's always hard when you lose. Particularly when you lose three-nil. We've got to continue to try and motivate them and get them up for the next two games. We've got to start winning games of cricket.
"We've lost 13 of the last 15 games we've played away with two being no results. That's pretty ordinary. Not good enough for an Australian cricket. We need to start turning the results around and winning some games of cricket."
Asked if such defeats are concerns for Australia, leading up to the Ashes series, Smith said nothing is better than winning.
"It's a different format, but I'll certainly like to start winning some games of cricket in every format, to be honest. Our results haven't been good enough and we need to turn them around.
"I probably thought our first probably 38 overs with the bat was very good. That was kind of the template we were trying to set. If we got to 330-340, which we probably should have done, things certainly could have been different."
He said it is difficult to say that things would have been different if they had played Adam Zampa instead of Aston Agar.
"You can have an argument for that. I thought Ashton (Agar) bowled well at times. Probably a little full to (Hardik) Pandya at times. He was obviously sent out to attack him.
"I thought that was our best chance of getting him out while he was trying to go after him. He didn't execute his skills as well we would have liked. And when he did get it right, bowled a bit wider, bowled a bit shorter. That wasn't our day."
