After Phil Salt’s 70 and Sam Curran’s cameo helped England to 201 for 7 in the third T20I, India’s batters were wowed by the pace and bounce of Jofra Archer and Josh Tong. India were bowled out for 76, their second-lowest T20I total, with no batter passing 13.
“Losing by such a big margin is definitely unacceptable,” Iyer said at the post-match press conference. “First of all, I feel like we need to come to terms with this loss and completely go back to the drawing board and look at what we did wrong.
“Looking at the wicket, I don’t think it was a 200 wicket to begin with. But other than that, the way we batted, we lost four wickets in the powerplay. I think that in itself didn’t create momentum and I definitely feel like we lost there,” Iyer said.
Iyer said India did not adapt well enough to the conditions and called their performance with bat and ball “terrible”.
“I think you can plan a lot when you’re in a team meeting. But once you step onto the court, you need to adapt as quickly as possible and try to figure out what lengths are important to bowl on a particular wicket. Just like today, the tight lengths helped the bowlers very well. I think we haven’t implemented that much.
“And even in our batting, I think when you’re chasing 200, you need to speed up the delivery. You have to have a set of templates for how you’re going to act in that inning. So we fell a little short on that. So definitely the execution was terrible.”
With two matches remaining in the series, Iyer urged his teammates to take responsibility for winning the matches individually.
“Of course we played terrible cricket, but we also learned a lot of lessons from it. Players need to start thinking about how to basically make an impact or create momentum for the team. So definitely every person has to think for themselves and see how they can win matches and take on that kind of responsibility.”
The 125-run victory gave England a commanding 2-0 lead in the five-match series with two games remaining in Bristol and Southampton.