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Bold and brave Scotland ready to take on semi-final hopefuls New Zealand

Cricket Scotland @CricketScotland
November 3, 2021 2 years
Bold and brave Scotland ready to take on semi-final hopefuls New Zealand

It has been a week since Scotland’s last outing at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup when they lost to Namibia, but the side faces a busy five-day period ahead with three matches against three of the world’s best sides, beginning with New Zealand.

Kyle Coetzer and the team have taken time to regroup after a difficult start to the Super 12 stage of the competition, and with the opponents needing a win to maintain their hopes of reaching the semi-finals, believes his team is capable of creating an upset.

“We know they’re a fantastic side. There’s been a couple of strong performances by them, guys putting them hands up to win some games. We know that they’re going to come and try and push us as hard as they possibly can. They just missed out on the 50-over World Cup a year or two ago, and they’ll certainly be pushing to try and make the later rounds of this competition. But pressure does some funny things sometimes, and we’ll be looking to assert ourselves on them as much as we possibly can and try and put them under some pressure,” said the Scotland captain.

“There was obviously a fair amount of disappointment after the two performances that we’ve put in since making the Super 12s. Putting it into a bigger picture, those performances especially weren’t necessarily how we wanted them to go, but cricket has its ways of keeping you very honest and keeping you very level. I’m a big believer of riding the wave and trying to use some of the emotions when you need to use them, but also you also need to be okay with sitting back and taking a step back and just figuring out where you actually are, reassessing, and then moving forward again.

“As an organisation I think we need to be bold and we need to be brave, and the group of players, we need to be bold and brave to try and find ways to keep progressing this group.

We have to not be satisfied with just being okay and not be satisfied with just getting through to Super 12s. We have to now start pushing the boundaries just that little bit further, and how that looks, I don’t know exactly, but I would encourage everyone back in Scotland to keep supporting this group of players and keep supporting the organisation as best as possible because there will be — we know that there will be someone out there and someone who wants to come on that journey with us, and it’s so important that we group together as a group of players and as an organisation and find that path that’s going to take us to that next level, and we’re going to have to have some help getting there. We need to have some bold and brave plans and bold and brave people who want to be involved with us to help us get there.”

The match starts at 10am UK time with coverage on Sky Sports and BBC Radio with regular updates on the Cricket Scotland twitter feed.

Scotland will play India on Friday before completing their World Cup campaign against Pakistan on Sunday.

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