The impressive performance in the ongoing South Africa tour has helped improve Indian batsmen's reputation of not being good players of short-pitched balls, pace spearhead Bhuvneshwar Kumar has asserted.
Kumar said South Africa's ploy to unsettle Indian batsmen with short-pitched balls back-fired in the first Twenty20 on Sunday.
"Whenever India goes abroad, the reputation is that India are not good at batting against short bowling. This time we have not 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," Bhuvneshwar said after India's 28-run win.
"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.
Bhuvneshwar (5 for 24) grabbed his maiden five-wicket haul in T20 internationals to help India restrict 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," he 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."
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 cricket against South Africa. This was despite the Proteas targeting India with a short-ball strategy.
Bhuvneshwar hailed the team's 28-run win in the first T20I as a "complete performance".