Rohit Sharma Says Indian Batters Were Not Brave, Aussie Bowlers Dictated On Their Terms

Australia have won the third test match at Indore by 9 wickets. They only needed to score 76 runs to win this morning and they had a early hiccup with wicket of Usman Khawaja, a few sensibly negotiated overs before the duo of Marnus Labuschagne and Travis Head did the much needed job for the Australian team. Rohit Sharma and co. tried their best in first half hour but as resistance fell, Australia bluntly crossed the winning line.

While talking in match presentation, Indian team captain Rohit Sharma talked about what went right and what went wrong for India but he also gave credit to Australia for the way they adopted to the conditions, perhaps more better than Indian players did.

“There’s a lot of things that didn’t go our way. We didn’t bat well in the first innings. We understand how important it is to put runs on the board in the first innings. We needed to put in a big performance with the bat but we couldn’t do that,” Rohit Sharma said in post match talk.

Now, the series has become more interesting. Australia are through the World Test Championship final and India will need to win the Ahmedabad test match to book their seat in the WTC final. Smith’s captaincy has ticked a number of wanted solutions and with the positivity and exultant mood, the competitiveness will be more intense in the final test match.

Australia has certainly improved but not where they expect to be as a team. For India, their batting only looked solid in Nagpur where Rohit Sharma scored a ton and in next couple of shaky situations, Jadeja and Axar ushered them out of trouble but Indian batting hasn’t been as rhythmic as you expect it be in home conditions.

Rohit Sharma understands the importance of sensible batting on such pitches and he mentioned “We need to understand that we need to improve as a team. When you are playing on challenging pitches you have to bowl. We allowed their bowlers to bowl in one spot. Not to take any credit away from their bowlers, Lyon especially. We had to be brave, which we were not.”

“We can take a lot of credit how we batted in the first two games. One odd game can happen where things don’t come together, but then you need players to come together and chip in. We wanted a few guys to stand up but we did not apply ourselves the way we would have liked.”

It’s all about learning from previous events. India were good in first two test matches so they will be extracting the winning formula from those set of plays. For Australia, it is all about enforcing the already invigorated set of plan. They can be more coherent as a team and there is everything to play for in forth and final test match at Ahmedabad