Sridhar steers clear of reserve days debate

New Zealand coach Gary Stead called it “mentally tough” to deal with and an “anomaly” after their World Cup match against India was washed out without the toss being held here at the Trent Bridge on Thursday.

The weather, like it’s been in the previous three days, remained gloomy through the day and intermittent rains rendered outfield unfit for play, forcing the abandonment at local time 3.00 pm.

“Yeah, it would have been lovely to play,” said Stead later. “It's always tough mentally, I think on a day like this, when you come down prepared to play, and it doesn't happen. But as you said, it's out of our control. We can't really do much about it, so we've got to move on quickly for South Africa (game),” he noted.

While he wasn’t convinced about having reserve days for such a big tournament, he admitted that losing out so many match days was an anomaly.

“Reserve days, I think, is going to be a logistical nightmare,” he stressed. “The ICC, I think, have made that fairly well-known. Unfortunately, it's a bit of an anomaly already. When you look at the amount of days we've lost already, I think it's the biggest sort of amount of days lost in a World Cup ever. So, we can't do much about that. We just have to, I guess, push on with what the schedule is.”

New Zealand had beaten India in the warm-up and Stead was asked if he was disappointed not to have a game after having had a measure of India.

“I'm not sure we found the measure of India necessarily,” he remarked. “I think the warm-up games were a chance for us to get back together as a team, but we're acutely aware it had no bearing on what was going to happen today. But as I said, we would have loved to have played India today. They're obviously going hot, and we feel as though we're playing reasonably well as well, so it would have been a really nice match-up,” he offered.

India’s fielding coach, R Sridhar, weighed in on the issue and decided to leave it to the ICC on reserve days. “Oh, there's a big technical committee from the ICC on that,” he said when sought his view. “It depends on the format, the time available. We don't have any days off in this tournament. Every day there is a game. So, there's hardly an opportunity to have a reserve day. I don't know the technical aspect of it. The ICC will decide that. It's not for me to take that call,” he observed.

India ideally would have liked to have the game that would have helped them get ready for the Pakistan game on Sunday, but Sridhar didn’t read too much into this. “It's (the weather) uncontrollable, isn't it? You really can't control the weather. We've had two good games and we came here looking forward to the third good one, but unfortunately, we can't control the weather. I went on the ground. It was almost like a skating rink. So, it would put too much risk on the players to play on there, especially at the early phase of the tournament,” Sridhar pointed out.