JOIN USBhuvneshwar Kumar said South Africa's ploy to unsettle Indian batsmen with short-pitched balls back-fired and the key to India's success in the first T20 international was changing the pace and bowling more slower deliveries.
Kumar (5 for 24) grabbed his maiden five-wicket haul in T20 internationals to help India notch up a 28-run win after restricting South Africa to 175-9 in 20 overs.
"What I was trying to do is bring about change of pace in my bowling. I just wanted to take the pace off the ball because I knew it won't be easy to hit the ball and that's what I did. The important thing is how you mix your deliveries according to the wicket," Kumar said.
"For instance, today we bowled a lot of slow balls. It was a part of our strategy on this wicket, to do away with pace and make it difficult for the batsmen to score. Apart from line and length, it's important to understand how you want to mix your deliveries. It matters. Today, for instance, it was about bowling slow."
"Whenever India goes abroad, the reputation is that India are not good at batting against short bowling. This time we haven't seen that thing. We have really tackled it well. Today they bowled 5-6 overs of short bowling to us early on and it really backfired on them."
Kumar opined that India's reputation against short pitched bowling has improved off late. "Whatever the reputation we had, in the last few years we are playing totally opposite of that. We have managed the short ball pretty well on this tour. They wanted to bowl short but it didn't really work well for them," he said.
"If some things doesn't work for you, you have to come up with something else (a plan B) but they didn't. So that's what probably worked to our advantage."