Need to play our best cricket to beat India: Williamson

New Zealand has returned to India a year after playing a full series, but this time for a much shorter duration. In 2016, New Zealand was swept 3-0 in the Test series but fought hard before going down 3-2 in the One-Day Internationals. This year, the team will play three ODIs and three Twenty20 Internationals, starting with the first ODI at the Wankhede Stadium on Sunday.

Kane Williamson, the New Zealand captain, said getting the better of India at home was going to be an extremely difficult task, notwithstanding the experience of conditions gained last year.

“We know that at home in particular, they’ll be the strongest team in the world,” said Williamson in Mumbai on Saturday. “There are no illusions that we need to come out and play our best cricket. We saw in the last series here that we were two-all going into the decider which was a fairly good effort, although we knew that perhaps we hadn’t played our best performance in that last game (in Visakhapatnam). It will be nice to come out in this series and do a little bit better.

“People talk a lot about adjusting to the conditions in India, and that’s really important not just when you come to India, but the specific grounds you play at, they are always a little bit different,” added Williamson. “We did that fairly well last time we were here and it would nice to do that better this time. We still did not put out our best performance in that last series, which was a hard-fought series, but we still were striving for that performance that we knew we could put out and hopefully we can show that in this series.”

New Zealand warmed up with two one-dayers against a fairly strong Board President’s XI side, losing the first match by 30 runs but winning the second by 33 runs. Williamson though, was putting more store on his squad getting a hit and a bowl than on the results.

“They were a couple of really good hit outs for us,” he said. “After a bit of break from international cricket, it was nice to get back together and start acclimatising as best as we can with the climate here in terms of humidity. The guys got through some good work, a number of batters spend some time in the middle, bowlers got through some good overs as well, so two really good hit outs for us coming into the next game tomorrow. But they count for a small amount, they are (for) preparation.”

The warm-up matches also probably helped firm up New Zealand’s plans for its batting order, with Williamson confirming that the two openers would be Martin Guptill and Colin Munro. While Tom Latham has also opened in the past, the captain indicated he would bat in the middle order and keep wickets.

“The opening batters for tomorrow are Guptill and Munro,” revealed Williamson. “Two good ball-strikers, exciting top-order players, and they look to play their natural game, which is important. It will be nice to see them get under way tomorrow.

“Tom Latham will bat in the middle order. He spent some good time in the middle in the last couple of warm-up games and will obviously ‘keep,” he went on. “Yes, look we have a relatively new middle order, some guys with injuries, some guys with some good opportunities. Certainly they all deserve their position and it’s exciting. These guys were here on the ‘A’ tour and experienced these conditions for a while coming into the series, which is always good. It is just important that we all look to play to our plan as best we can and we know if we are doing that, then we will contribute to what a good total is.”

A lot of New Zealand’s fortunes will depend on Williamson himself, with the captain being the batting fulcrum around which the rest revolve. His batting apart, his leadership will also play a vital role.

“For me, captaincy is about the people around you rather than yourself,” he explained. “How to get the guys ticking as best as they can be, how can we try and play our best cricket, look at our performances. The captaincy and my opinion are shaped around that, rather than perhaps being soft or any other nice words. That is how I do look at it. Everyone has got a different style, and within our team there are a number of leaders that contribute to our leadership and are certainly considered in terms of how we want to approach our cricket.”

Williamson also acknowledged that captaining a side on slower, turning surfaces meant he would have to adopt a different approach as a skipper too.

“Yeah, it is different. We have mentioned the word aggression in captaincy before but sometimes, in our conditions where the ball moves off the seam with our seamers, aggression is often seen as having slips and various catchers,” he said. “Over here, at times, it may not be suited and it may be a bit more spin friendly. Sometimes the surfaces can be slower, and to blast teams out can be unrealistic. You have to skin it in another way. It is important to adapt and sometimes play the long game even in one-day cricket, because if you can build pressure on some of those surfaces, that can help you take wickets. And we know that in one-day cricket or any format, taking wickets is really important.”