By Nick Mulvenney
SYDNEY (Reuters) – New Zealand skipper Kane Williamson was frustrated by his team’s sub-par performance as their Twenty20 World Cup dream ended with defeat to Pakistan in Wednesday’s semi-final.
The loss means Black Caps will return home without a trophy from a fifth straight white-ball World Cup, despite reaching at least the semi-finals in all of them.
Williamson felt New Zealand’s total of 152-4 at the Sydney Cricket Ground had been a winning position, but Pakistan had 105 runs on the board before they lost their first batsman and romped to a seven-wicket win.
“The journey in this tournament has been a lot of good but it’s just frustrating not put out a better performance today,” he told reporters.
“If you get beaten playing your best cricket, then you certainly have to accept that. Today was a little bit disappointing. There were some good bits but we thought we had a defendable total if we were to be on our game.”
New Zealand were bidding to reach a second successive T20 World Cup final after their loss to Australia in Abu Dhabi last year, which came after successive defeats in the finals of the 2015 and 2019 World Cups in the one-day format.
Asked about again failing to get his hands on any silverware, Williamson reverted to his focus on performance.
“You’re always looking at the performance, and we’ve played in a number of different finals and put out really good performances, probably good enough to win,” he said.
“And then we’ve got met by a side that’s played a little bit better or about equal.
“The frustrating part of this today is we weren’t quite on top of our game. We fought hard and we showed some good characteristics, and attitudes we want to see, but, yeah, it wasn’t to be.
“You play a number of tournaments, you want to win some, but you finish the tournament and you just start focusing on the next one.”
Now 32 and more than 12 years into his international career, Williamson said he would be having a good think about how much he would feature for New Zealand in the future.
“I certainly love playing in all the formats but there’s a lot of cricket so that needs to be managed a little bit,” he said.
“It’s a changing landscape with players all round the world. After these sorts of events you sit down to reflect and look at what’s coming up.”
(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Alexander Smith)
