Abu Dhabi: Stuart Broad was all smiles after pulling off a spectacular five run win over Pakistan to bag the three match Twenty20 series at the Zayed Cricket Stadium yesterday.
Candidly admitting that the game almost slipped away from him, he described in-depth the main factors that titled the match in his team's favour.
"It was a tense game. KP [Kevin Pietersen] showed his experience, to know it wasn't going to be a 150-160 wicket. Once we got up to 130, I always thought that was going to be competitive," he said.
Broad revealed that the one-day match here had made him realise how tough it could be to reach the target.
"We have seen in the one-day games here that it is quite hard to hit length balls. I think the boundaries we went for early were full deliveries which the Pakistan batsmen managed to get away. So we talked about it when the spinners were on and when the seamers came back we made sure we are heavy as we could be and made the batsmen struggle from those sort of length," he said.
Dernbach praised
Broad went on to praise Jade Dernbach who bowled brilliantly towards the end. "Jade was fantastic towards his last two overs as they were highly pressure overs to bowl. He showed his Twenty20 class there," said Broad, who attributed the first match defeat in the Twenty20 series to lack of experience.
"We had a bit of inexperience in the first game and today they had a lot of experience. It proves that it was a difficult wicket to score on and that is what kept us going till the end. Otherwise, the game was slipping away from us. The 11 guys on the field were very clear that, if we could get a couple of tight overs in, you can change Twenty20 games just like that and we knew it was not going to be easy to get seven-and-a-half run rate in the end. The communication through the fellows was brilliant and that probably led to us winning the game."
Has the victories in the one-day and Twenty20 series wiped away the disappointment of the thrashing in the Test series? "The one-day and Twenty20 win does not make up for the Test matches because that was a hugely disappointing series for us. We came over here wanting to really prove ourselves on the sub continent and we did not do that but we have got an opportunity to do that when we go to Sri Lanka next week.
"To be the best team in the world we have to show character and a lot of guys who stayed on really did that to win the ODI series four nil and win the Twenty20 series too."
