WI captain Brian Lara blamed poor batting for their defeat against Lanka in the final qualifying match of Champions Trophy.
MUMBAI: West Indies captain Brian Lara blamed poor batting for their nine-wicket defeat against Sri Lanka in the final qualifying match of the ICC Champions Trophy on Saturday.
Admitting that his batsmen had failed against the Sri Lankan bowlers, especially Man of the Match Farveez Maharoof, the stylish West Indies captain said, "Though we both played on the same sluggish pitch but we batted poorly and paid the price for it".
Opting to bat first, the West Indies were all out for 80 runs in 30.4 overs - their lowest ever score against Sri Lanka - as Mahroof picked up six wickets for a mere 14 runs.
"The pitch was slower than we had expected but we need to just play straight and we failed to do that," Lara said in the post-match news conference.
He said that with wickets falling early and at regular intervals, every batsman was under pressure and the batting collapsed.
"It's hard to explain a total of under 100. Every player is important to me. Chanderpaul looked good but got out early," Lara said.
Asked if the team suffered from lack of practice, he said that being a professional team, they have to be match-ready for any tournament. "This cannot be an excuse for losing a match."
The match at the Brabourne stadium of the Cricket Club of India (CCI) was, however, inconsequential as both teams had already qualified for the main round of the tournament.
Sri Lanka emerged as the first qualifier and now are in Group B with Pakistan, South Africa and New Zealand. West Indies are the second qualifier and are placed in Group A with India, Australia and England.
"It's going to be a tough group with Australia, the world champions, and India, the host country - and England too is a very good opposition. I think that it is going to be a tough competition, but we got all the ingredients to win the trophy," Lara said.
Wanting to put behind Saturday's defeat, the prolific batsman said: "We have an opportunity to improve and work on our batting. The fact is that we have beaten the best team in the world (Australia). We had won three games straight four years ago.
"We can't delve too much about what happened today. We are not going to meet Sri Lanka unless we both reach the semi-finals or the finals. So we got to put this behind us."
Earlier, Sri Lanka captain Mahela Jayawardene attributed the win to team effort and had a word of praise for the young bowlers in his squad.
"We are looking forward to a good tournament and we have taken each game at a time. We have learnt from our experience and our bowlers put West Indies under a lot of pressure," Jayawardene said.
"Everybody in the team knows their role. We played as team today and built pressure against the West Indies. All the bowlers contributed to the match and Farveez got the breakthroughs.
"We are playing smart cricket and have been improving on our mistakes. We try and find out the areas where we can improve," the Sri Lanka captain said.
"These young guys in the team are performing very well. There are five-six guys who are performing very well and can take wickets for us," Mahela said singling out Lasith Malinga, Dilhara Fernando and Mahroof.
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