To witness the first day of the pink-ball game in India, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and Kapil Dev were the some of the famous former Indian cricketers who attended the event. Rahul Dravid, who is ever ready to take up new challenges, opined that he would have loved to play the day-night Test match.
Rahul Dravid loved the atmosphere in Kolkata
The former Indian cricketer had good memories at the Eden Gardens. In 2001, the Indian team claimed a historic victory at Eden Gardens. Rahul Dravid was the part of that Test match. He had set a big partnership with VVS Laxman and made that Test match memorable in Indian cricket history.
On the first day of the pink-ball game, huge people came to watch their favourite players playing under the light. The head of cricket in National Cricket Academy (NCA), Rahul Dravid, expressed that he would be grateful to play in front of the big crowd.
“Brings back some lovely memories and I’m so happy to be here. When you have 45-50,000 people it is amazing. It is an incredible atmosphere and lovely to see this kind of crowd. It is superb and what more can you ask for? I hope we can do this more often,” he said.
Would have loved (to play Day-Night Tests). I always wanted to play in front of 40,000-50,000 people. When we played at the Eden Gardens in 2001, you had 100,000 people watching and that gave us joy,” he explained.
Bangladesh all out on 106 runs
Bangladesh was as usual weak in batting. Skipper Mominul Haque again made a difficult choice to bat first which backfired the visitors. Shadman Islam (29) and Liton Das (24) were the only two batsmen in the team to reach the 20-run mark. Umesh Yadav picked the wickets of the top-order batsmen. Mominul Haque and Mushfiqur Rahim were out on a duck.
Mohammed Shami was in full attack with his bowling action. Liton Das and Nayeem Hasan were struck with the ball in their helmet when they were facing Shami. There were resulted in two concussion substitutions -Mehidy Hasan (in place of Liton Das) and Taijul Islam (in place of Nayeem Hasan). Ishant Sharma picked the five-wicket haul in the first pink ball game of India.
The first day ended with India losing the wickets of Rohit Sharma (21), Chiteshwar Pujara (55) and Mayank Agarwal (14). Indian skipper Virat Kohli (59*) and Ajinkya Rahane (23*) will continue batting on the second day.