India no longer worried over short-pitched balls: Bhuvneshwar Kumar

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Johannesburg, February 19: Bhuvneshwar Kumar said India's reputation of being not so good players of short-pitched balls has been changing over the years.

Bhuvneshwar's argument was based on the fact that South Africa pacers targeting India batsmen with short stuff in the first T20I here on Sunday with limited success.

Shikhar Dhawan scored 72 off 39 balls as India sped off in the powerplay overs. The visitors finished with 203/5, their highest total in T20 against South Africa despite the Proteas targeting India with a short-ball strategy.

Bhuvneshwar said: "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."

The pacer opined that India's reputation against short bowling has improved of 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.

"Something doesn't work for you, you have to come up for something else (a plan B, but they didn't). So that's what probably worked to our advantage," he signed off.