Pooran: I’m more than a T20 player

SOUTHAMPTON, England, CMC – Nicholas Pooran hopes that by proving his worth in the ongoing World Cup he will shake off the perception that he is only a T20 player.

The 23-year-old was one of the few bright sparks on Friday when the West Indies went down by eight wickets to home side England.

Pooran topscored with 63 and featured in an 89-run partnership with Shimron Hetmyer, as the Windies were dismissed for a paltry 212.

Having played 102 T20 games in his career compared with just three first-class games for Trinidad and Tobago, Pooran said he wanted to prove he was capable of playing in all formats of the game.

“My job is to play cricket, it does not matter which format. I’m not rushing anything, I’m just trying to get better and better each day. I back myself to do that,” he said.

“My dream was always to play cricket professionally and represent the West Indies at a World Cup someday. It feels wonderful. I just learned a lot from T20 cricket and now my chance is to play ODI cricket. It’s different, you have to bat longer and so it is up to me now to adjust.

“I want to get better and better and not make the same mistakes over and over again. You can’t judge T20 cricket and every game brings a different situation,” Pooran added.

While he intends to continue scoring runs in the World Cup, Pooran said it was also important for the other batsmen to get big scores.

He said he was confident the regional side would come out stronger in their next match against Bangladesh.

“We will come out hard and we need a victory. We made simple mistakes [against England] but we need to stick to our game plan. We lost some wickets cheaply but I don’t think we have given our hand away yet,” he explained.

“They were soft dismissals. In every game, we have dominated periods but we now just need to dominate for a lot longer. We need to improve in the middle and dominate the big periods for us.”

Pooran is right