'We need to play our best cricket'

Kane Williamson has no illusions about New Zealand’s chance in the short limited-overs series (three ODIs and as many T20Is) against India. He believes India are the toughest team in the world to beat in home conditions and the challenges are at multiple levels. The Kiwi skipper discusses a range of issues ahead of the first ODI here on Saturday. Excerpts. 

On India’s record at home: We know that at home in particular they’ll be the strongest team in the world. There are no illusions that we need to come out and play our best cricket. We saw in the last series here that we were 2-all going into the decider which was a fairly good effort, although we knew that perhaps we hadn’t played our best performance and it was a shame in that last game (in Visakhapatnam). It will be nice to come out in this series and do a little bit better.

On lessons from last series: People talk a lot about adjusting to the conditions in India, and that’s really important not just when you come to India but the specific grounds you play at, they are always a little bit different. We did that fairly well last time we were here and it would nice to do that better (this time). We still did not put out our best performance in that last series, which was a hard-fought series but we still were striving for that performance that we knew we could put out and hopefully we can show that in this series.

On captaincy on slow and turning wickets: It is different. We have mentioned the word aggression in captaincy before but sometimes, in our conditions where the ball moves off the seam, our seamers aggression is often seen as having slips and various catchers. Over here, at times, it may not be suited and it may be a bit more spin-friendly. Sometimes the surfaces can be slower, and to blast teams out can be unrealistic.

You have to skin it in another way. It is important to adapt and sometimes play the long game even in one-day cricket because if you can build pressure on some of those surfaces, that can help you take wickets, because we know that in one-day cricket or any format, taking wickets is really important.