India captain Rohit Sharma has rued the batting performances from his batters in the aftermath of the loss in the Indore Test, which allowed Australia to keep the Border-Gavaskar 2023 series alive. Going into the 4th and last Test, in Ahmedabad, the scoreline stands at 2-1.
With this 9-wicket victory, Australia have sealed their place in the WTC final while India will have to win the Ahmedabad Test to book their place alongside Australia in the WTC final, otherwise they will have to hope for New Zealand to not get 2-0 whitewashed by Sri Lanka.
Coming to the Indore Test, India were bundled out for 109 on the first day with Virat Kohli top-scoring with 22, and 163 on the second day with Cheteshwar Pujara waging a lone battle with 59. Australia rode on Usman Khawaja’s 60 in the first innings to take an 88-run lead, which proved enough as they were set a target of 76 runs, which they gunned down courtesy of Travis Head’s mature and attacking 49* runs knock.
Matthew Kuhnemann took a five-fer in the first innings, but it was Nathan Lyon who ran the show in the second innings taking 8/64 and was adjudged the Player of the Match for taking 11 wickets in all.
Rohit Sharma, in no uncertain terms, lamented India’s batting efforts from the first innings, which resulted in a very low second innings lead. The 35-year-old reckoned had India got a good first innings score, after winning the toss and batting first, things could have been better.
“When you lose a Test match, there are a lot of things which didn’t go our way, to start with we didn’t bat well in the 1st innings, we understand how important it is to put runs on the board in the 1st innings and when they got 80-90 runs lead, we had to produce another innings with the bat but we were not able to do that again. We got just 75 on the board, if we batted well in the 1st innings, things would have been slightly different,” Rohit Sharma said in the post-match press conference.
Rohit Sharma feels Indian batters succumbed to Aussie spinners’ accuracy
Rohit refused to put any blame on the Indore surface, which took turn and gave bite to the spinners from the first morning, adding that Indian batters needed to be a “little brave” to unsettle the opponent spinners’ lengths.
“We need to understand, no matter what the pitches are, you gotta come out and do the job. We need to keep it simple and follow the plan. When you are playing on challenging pitches, we need to be brave. We allowed their bowlers to bowl on one particular spot. Not taking any credit away from their bowlers. especially Nathan Lyon, he kept challenging us hitting the right lengths. When the bowler is trying to do that, gotta be a little brave which I thought we were not,” the skipper added.
The fourth Test in Ahmedabad will start on 9 March.
