Three-nought looks bad, but we fought hard - Brathwaite

Fabian Allen collapsed on the ground, face buried in his hands. Shimron Hetmyer, Carlos Brathwaite and Shai Hope stood distraught, before the Windies captain quickly got his emotions under check. A misfield off the last ball by Allen, the bowler, had allowed Manish Pandey and Dinesh Karthik to steal a single and denied Windies a morale-lifting tie before they amble across to Bangladesh on this subcontinental tour. Rishabh Pant and Shikhar Dhawan, both seated in the team's dugout with their pads still on, could afford a sheepish smile now. Almost in tears; Allen was consoled by his captain Brathwaite, while Karthik and Pandey converged mid-pitch for more giggles and then handshakes.

It wasn't often but whenever Windies managed a good show with the ball in the three-match T20I series, they gave India a mighty scare. On Sunday, they nearly defended eight off the last two overs in Chennai despite a Dhawan-Pant show that had reduced India's chase to a formality. To think, one less of the seven extras conceded could have given Windies a win to end their tour on a high. And incidentally, that decisive run could have been the cruel wide adjudged off Brathwaite in the 18th over.

Having conceded a total of six runs off the first two balls - including two free-hits - the Windies skipper sent down a leg-side yorker to Pant. The left-hander, who was trying to make room initially, skipped out of the way at the last minute. The ball went by the leg-stump and the umpire signalled a wide, much to Brathwaite's displeasure.

While candidly admitting why he didn't approve of the umpire's decision, Brathwaite also maintained that it would be unsporting to put the blame squarely on a controversial decision for their loss. He instead lauded his bowling unit for stretching India to the final ball of the game even though the game seemed to have slipped out of their grasp much earlier.

"I hope that anything I say now, I won't be fined for. If I get immunity, I can answer truthfully. But, it's down to interpretation," Brathwaite said after Windies' six-wicket loss in Chennai. "In my opinion, Rishabh stepped away and stepped across, and if he was staying in his stance it would've hit his boots. And then he jumped inside his stance, so in my opinion it wasn't a wide because of that. In the umpire's opinion, even if he stood in his stance it would've been a wide and he made the final call, and at the end of the day you need to live by what the umpire says.

"But you can't look back at it. If one of the fours would've gone for one, then we would've won by three runs. So you can't look at every single ball and think 'this one decision, or that one decision cost us the game'. Need to give credit to Shikhar and Rishabh who played very, very well. I'll also give credit to my group of guys, who started well with the ball. The partnership seemed to take the game away from us, but we stuck in, we kept our belief and we played till the end. So I think it was a good game of cricket, and don't want to ruin the spectacle and the entertainment by picking out one call here or there."

The Windies captain also heaped praise on Nicholas Pooran, who after missing out on the first game and misfiring in the second, made amends with a defining contribution of an unbeaten 53 to guide the visitors to a daunting 181-run total. On a wicket assisting spin, the Windies batsman used the switch hit to good effect in his 25-ball effort that saw four sixes and as many boundaries. Brathwaite was particularly impressed with Pooran's acceleration towards the end to make up for his watchful start, thereby giving Windies' total an extra edge.

"I want you to realise it wasn't just his big hitting. He played some reverse scoops and he paced his innings very well. Obviously, the sixes will take the highlight, but let's not forget how slowly he started. Getting the pace of the wicket, lining up the bowlers and then choosing the right time to strike. So I wouldn't just say it's big hitting, it was really entertaining and I enjoyed it from the sidelines," Brathwaite noted.

"And, you know, as a team that's what we have - the ability for players to take the game away from the opposition and play a knock such as that. The challenge for us to do that on a more consistent basis. Because we know we have 2-3-4 match-winners in the side who can blow the team away. What we don't want, is that when a match winning performance comes, that it only brings us close. So massive credit to Nicholas who missed the first game, didn't get a start in the second, but he was always positive and all credit goes to him. But as a team, we want that performance again from him," the 30-year-old added.

Brathwaite said there were more than just this one positive in the batting department for Windies in this game, after two dismal outings earlier in the series, which proves they improving on the go. He,however, admitted the challenge remains to achieve consistency. "Darren Bravo's knock was good as well, he laid the foundation in the middle overs till the end. He batted all the way through, so we had a good solid performances with the bat today. Obviously, Nicholas gets the plaudits because he raised his bat, but credit must go to the opening pair as well for getting us to fifty in the first six. We had a lot of positives with the bat, it's about replicating this game in and game out."

Despite their so-close-yet-so-far moment, the series scoreline will read 3-0, and probably not reveal the character and fight shown by this young side at various stages across the three games in its entirety. As far as the numbers are concerned, Windies have lost all nine games on the trot in Asia since their 2016 World Twenty20 triumph, of which Brathwaite was a key protagonist. However, the captain drew satisfaction from the fact that his 'depleted' Windies ran India close despite limited resources at their disposal. Another subcontinental challenge awaits them - in Bangladesh, in a little over a month's time - and Brathwaite remained upbeat.

"Team morale is up. What we are doing as a group is to find the best way we can use the resources that we have. In the first game, we showed our fight, we showed our belief with the ball. Second game, we were blown away, and in the third game we batted excellently, but the game got taken away by us from a massive partnership and we still fought till the end. I mean, three-nought looks bad, and it looks embarrassing for me as captain as well, but the performances we gave, and the fight and the fact that we came together to use our resources to the best of our abilities was the hallmark for this short series for me," Brathwaite said.

"And if we can take what we learnt from this series so far and work on it, and come back to Bangladesh as if this is the fourth game of the series as opposed to the starting of another series. We had back-to-back games, we didn't start as well as we wanted, and by the time we got into the tour we had lost the series. And we came back to do a better performance with bat and ball tonight. So if we can get this performance into Bangladesh's first game of the series, then we can look to come out on top in that series," he concluded.