India head coach Rahul Dravid was left rueing over the inability of his team not getting 70-80 runs more in their first innings of the Hyderabad Test which the hosts’ eventually ended up losing by 28 runs to England at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium.
In their first innings total of 436, Yashasvi Jaiswal, KL Rahul and Ravindra Jadeja made 80, 86 and 87 respectively, while captain Rohit Sharma and Shreyas Iyer fell after getting starts. Despite taking a 190-run lead, India squandered that advantage as England vice-captain Ollie Pope scored a sensational 196 to turn the game around in the visitors’ favour.
“I thought we left probably 70 runs on the board in the first innings. In our first innings, when conditions were pretty good to bat in on day two, I thought in the kinds of situations we got ourselves into, some good starts and we didn’t really capitalise.”
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“We didn’t get a hundred, we didn’t get somebody getting a really big hundred for us. So, in some ways, in India, I just felt we left those 70, 80 runs back in the hut in the first innings. Second innings is always going to be challenging. It’s one of those things that it’s tough. It’s not easy to chase 230 or it’s not done very often,” said Dravid in the post-match press conference.
India were given the challenge of chasing down 231 on day four, but none of the batters were proactive, nor applied themselves and fell in tame fashion to be out for 202, with debutant left-arm spinner Tom Hartley taking a superb 7-62. With many batters dismissals in second innings varying between giving catches to close-in fielders and being trapped lbw, Dravid opined the young Indian batters’ are still learning the craft of playing a long innings in Test cricket.
“A lot of players are quite young, in the sense that a lot of these guys do play a lot of white-ball cricket and also maybe don’t get a lot of time to get to play a lot of first-class cricket as well. So they’re learning and I think they’re getting there. To be fair, there have been challenging wickets as well over the last few years.”
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