England captain Jos Buttler praised English batters and said that the positivity they delivered on a difficult Lord’s surface made the crucial difference. The English skipper led his team to a big 100-run win over Team India to level the series 1-1 and set up a deciding clash at the Old Trafford Cricket Ground for the third and last match of the three-game series.


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“We play at Lord’s quite a lot and it’s never a brilliant batting wicket, never completely straightforward. It’s always got that bit of a feel as well as a batsman. It felt a bit like the World Cup final wicket, not completely straightforward and that creates interesting games of cricket as well,” Buttler said in a post-match press conference. “If you held a length, it was very tough to score. It felt like you could beat the bat and create wickets, so it was a different style of ODI cricket to that we have sometimes seen over the last few years in England when we`ve played on excellent wickets and it`s been high-scoring,” he added.


Virat Kohli has been facing criticism after the latter failed to deliver at Lord’s during the second ODI. Buttler, however, backed Kohli and said the Indian star batter is due for a big innings.


“I suppose in a little way it’s quite refreshing for the rest of us that he (Kohli) is human and he can have a couple of low scores as well, but look he has been one of the best players, if not the best player in ODI cricket in the world,” he said.



“So he’s been a fantastic player for so many years and all batters, it just proves, go through runs of form where they don’t perform as well as they can do sometimes, but certainly as an opposition captain, you know a player of that class is always due, so you’re hoping that it doesn’t come against us,” Buttler added.


“Yeah, incredibly surprised, as I said, his record speaks for himself. The matches he’s won for India and yeah, why would you question that?” Buttler said.


Talking about the match and how they handled the early drubbing Buttler said, “Today the positivity we showed with the bat is actually what enabled us to get up to the score that we did,” he added.


“I think we can bat better. Absolutely we can, but instead of playing it safe and allowing the bowlers to just settle in on a length, we actually were proactive and played some positive shots, which I think earned us a few extra runs than potentially we may have got,” said England captain.


(with ANI inputs)