We Need To Win Them All Now - Klinger
14 July 2013
Skipper Michael Klinger admitted Gloucestershire’s batsmen were caught out by a poor College Ground pitch as they crashed to a six-wicket defeat at the hands of Warwickshire in the first ever Twenty20 contest to be staged at the Cheltenham Festival.
Unheralded off spinner Ateeq Javid claimed career-best Twenty20 figures of 4-17 as Gloucestershire, having been inserted on an apparently true surface, were shot out for just 96 in 18.4 overs.
Warwickshire made relatively quick work of chasing, reaching their target with 2.5 overs to spare thanks to a match-winning knock of 33 from Varun Chopra.
Although Michael refused to make excuses for what was a below-par batting performance, he claimed a slow wicket that offered assistance to spin came as a complete surprise.
He told this website: “Nobody expected the wicket to be such a poor standard for Twenty20 cricket. I can only apologise to the fans for producing that. It was certainly not what we were after.
“It is disappointing when you have such a large crowd and we must make sure we are able to prepare something a lot better when we play Northants here on Tuesday.
“Saying that, once we got ourselves out of a hole at 60-3, we probably should have known how it was playing and worked out how to go about it.
“I think 130 would have been a really tough score to chase, but we were not able to execute what we were talking about. When you are defending 96, everything has to go your way.”
A fourth defeat in five games leaves Gloucestershire at the foot of the table and facing an uphill task to qualify for the quarter-finals.
Michael admitted: “It looks as though we are going to have to win every one of our five games from here-on in.
“We still have to play Somerset, Northants and Glamorgan, which gives us a chance, but we certainly cannot afford any more defeats.”
For more details of the Warwickshire game click on Cricket and then Match Reports.
