India captain Rohit Sharma remarked that everyone on the team should have played counter-attacking cricket, similar to what Shreyas Iyer did in the second innings of the match, after India lost to Australia in the third Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.
The batsman, who was born in Bombay, further stated that during the fourth Test at Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium, someone needed to step up and challenge the bowlers. Rohit stated that little cameos are now not working well and he wants his teammates to contribute more with that bat. “When you’re playing on pitches like this, you need a Shreyas Iyer kind of an innings. Someone has to step up, someone has to take down the bowlers. It cannot always be that the batters will get 100 runs, 90 runs, 80 runs, you have to play cameos like that,” Rohit told press.
If one of the top batters can get a big score, that’s a plus, that’s great, but when you know the pitch has some offering, there is a challenge, you need guys to go out there and play the way Iyer did, even though it [his dismissal] was a little unlucky or unfortunate, I would say, he timed the ball really well, straight went into the hands – not straight into the hands, Khawaja took a very good catch – but you need that kind of innings,” he added.
India played poorly with the bat in both of their innings of the third Test, as they were dismissed for 109 and 163 respectively. Virat Kohli and Shreyas Iyer both got off to good starts, but they were unable to capitalise. KS Bharat and Ravindra Jadeja, on the other hand, were rather pale. Rohit mentioned the same thing, saying that they made some bad shots and needed to focus more in the middle.
“Both the innings was not the way we would have liked to. Even in the first innings, I don’t think there was a lot happening. If you looked at all the dismissals, we played poorly. Maybe out of the 10 wickets in the first innings, maybe one or two were where the pitch did help the bowler a little bit. Other than that it was the skill of the bowler to fox the batsman out and get rid of the batters. We played some poor shots as well. We didn’t apply enough,” said Rohit.