India Vs Australia 2017: We Saved The Best For The Last – Ravi Shastri
Jan 9, 2019 at 3:57 PM
Lauding his side’s batsmen for such an emphatic performance, India’s head coach Ravi Shastri was full of smiles after the men in blue decimated Australia at Nagpur. The victory in the final ODI of the series means that now India are the number one ODI outfit and that defines how brilliant 2017 has been for them. After whitewashing Sri Lanka, the Virat Kohli led unit marauded Australia 4-1 just like that.
Rohit Sharma was in his groove at Nagpur as he breezed through with the chase. Getting off the mark on his 14th delivery, there was no looking back for Hitman as he began decimating the Kangaroos. Scoring the 14th ton of his career, and 6th against Australia, Rohit’s knock of 125 off just 109 balls was just a treat to the eyes.
Post India’s 4-1 series victory, Ravi Shastri was full of smiles. The Indian coach lauded his outfit for such a powerful performance and mentioned that the team deserved credit for batting so well on a testing track. In his words, Shastri was full of praises for Rohit Sharma and Hardik Pandya.
“If you want to be rated as a good team you’ve got to be relentless,” said Shastri. “We repeated the job on multiple occasions, and that is how we were ruthless in this series. Hitman (Rohit Sharma) did a superb job for us in the match; he was brilliant.”
Lauding the death bowling, Shastri said:
“The death bowling is tremendous. It is all down to skills, when you have bowlers like these, they bring you back in the final overs. They complement each other really well, they have experience, have different actions and hit their yorkers to perfection.”
Shastri was also quite vocal in backing Hardik Pandya for his outstanding performances.
“Hardik is someone who can take on the bowling right from the start, he is a floater for us. I haven’t seen striking like that, probably Yuvraj in his youth but this guy is special and still has the exuberance of youth. We can raise the bar in the fielding and we can seize the big moments. We also need batsmen to carry on after they score 60s and 70s, quite like what Rohit did today,” said Shastri.