India vs New Zealand | Building partnerships will be our biggest challenge, says Gary Stead

Kiwi coach, Gary Stead, will certainly be under pressure after his team lost the opening two games of the five-match ODI series against India on home soil in the last week. Kane Williamson & Co. currently trail the visitors by 2-0 after losing Saturday’s match against India by a massive 90-run margin. They had initially lost the first game by eight wickets in Napier.

Stead, who recently took charge of the New Zealand national team, claimed that his side needs to put up strong partnerships if they wanted to give the Indians some competition in the remaining three matches of the ongoing series.

“They batted well and I was thinking it could have been 350 plus. So I am pleased with the back end bowling performance there. In the end, the work Bracewell put in was a promising sign but it wasn’t a complete performance by any means.

“We haven’t build partnership across the top 6-7, which was the strength of what we did so well against Sri Lanka and what we haven’t clicked or done here yet. As a batting unit, that is going to be our challenge going into the next three games, to build those partnerships,” Gary told PTI sources.

New Zealand failed to build a partnership at the top with number eight batsman Doug Bracewell (57) sharing 58 runs with no 10 Lockie Ferguson at the death. However, the Kiwi chief coach added that he still has faith in his squad as the hosts’ continue experimenting with the players to figure their best starting XI combo.

“Our guys know that you can’t rely on lower order to win games, its got to be the top order to score the majority of the runs, we haven’t done that as yet in the two games.

“I still have faith in our squad, we are still in someway experimenting, trying to work our what is our best XI is, and it is an ongoing thing, it will slightly change with the conditions as well,” he added.

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