Italy proud of proving doubters wrong in maiden T20WC

Finishing on a high is now the focus for Italy, after suffering a second-straight defeat in Group C.

But having pushed one of the globe's top T20I teams in England, the Italians have proven their status in world cricket is here to stay.

In their maiden ICC Men's T20 World Cup, they not only claimed a special victory, but made the English fight tooth and nail for their win.

Acting captain Harry Manenti spent time post-game reflecting on the 'pinch me' experience their campaign has been so far.

"We have guys out there who haven't played under lights before our preparation," he told media after their defeat against England.

"They've just been facing Joffra Archer and Jamie Overton and Sam Curran under lights in front of maybe 15,000 people who when you sit back and appreciate that, and I'm sure as many of you do, that's a pretty impressive thing for guys to be able to go from - we came from Rome playing in synthetic cricket against some low-end European nations who were just as passionate as us.

"But we've gone from that to playing England at Eden Gardens in the space of 18 months. It's a massive climb and probably a climb that it's hard to then match that in your output on the field. But I think we've done pretty close to if not outperformed our ranking."

"I think today we showed that even under pressure and even when you shouldn't be in the game in the contest we found a way to (be)," he continued.

"A lot of the Associate nations have put some pressure on (higher-ranked teams at this T20 World Cup). I think if you do it once, maybe it's a fluke. But we've now beaten some really good teams and competed with some good teams as well. I think we're starting to build a bit of a resume now."

"I think we've seen 20 teams in this World Cup (and) I think all 20 teams at some stage have competed. It would be nice if everyone can walk away with a win. It's not the way it is and there's some really good teams out there. But for the teams ranked from 15 to 25 to continue to grow, I think we need to be continuing to play more cricket.

"Even though the result didn't go our way today, I think there's plenty of positives to take out of it from Italian cricket and world cricket."

It took an unbeaten fifty from Will Jacks, coming in at No.7 for England, to scrape out a score of 202/7 against Italy.

In reply, the Italians finished all out for 178 from their alloted 20 overs, but had zero regrets going down swinging.

"That was our plan all along in this whole tournament is we want to play the way we play," Menenti continued.

"We didn't want to get dictated by the English team who we saw tonight. We've seen for the last few years they play the game their way, they play their shots and even when they're losing wickets they still take the game on. And from our point of view if we were any chance of winning tonight we had to be the ones to try and play some shots.

"If we were chasing 200 and we tried to give ourselves a big chance and needed 15s after five overs, we weren't winning anyway. So the same thing happened in Scotland.

"We got a little bit of pushback from media as well and people online saying that we're not good enough to be here. We were trying to win that game, chasing over 200. We're happy to get bowled out for a low score trying to win. We'll always risk losing to try and win a game of cricket. And I think we did that today, and we should hold our heads high."

Italy's last chance to claim another elusive T20 World Cup win won't be easy, taking on a high powered West Indies side. But there's no doubt they'll give it everything.

"I think it's another great opportunity for us to showcase how good we are and our abilities and some of the individual performances," Manenti added.

"If we can go out there and compete with West Indies again, whether we are on the right side of the result or not, it's great for Italian cricket to keep pushing our case and hopefully after that game and moving forward more teams are willing to come and play us or we travel to them and that's the aim for us moving forward."

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