Indian cricket captain Rohit Sharma played down his team’s poor batting performance in the first of two Tests against South Africa in Centurion. The Men In Blue were dismissed for 245 and 131, suffering an innings and 32-run defeat in one of their worst performances in whites in the Boxing Day Test, which concluded in less than three days.
Apart from KL Rahul’s century in the first innings and Virat Kohli’s determined 76 in the second innings, India failed to put up any significant batting effort. Rohit Sharma managed to score only five runs, while young Indian batters Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill were unable to make a significant contribution. Shreyas Iyer failed to capitalize on his start in the first innings and struggled in the second, falling to the brilliant bowling of the South African pacers.
Speaking after India’s innings defeat in Centurion, Rohit Sharma said it was not fair to dismiss India’s batting unit performance over the years after one failure, pointing out that the same unit had performed well in winning series in Australia and drawing one in England in the previous three years. He also highlighted the team’s batting performances in previous overseas tours.
“Yes, we had a performance like this here. But, don’t forget, what we did in Australia and England. In Australia, we won the series, there our batters stepped up. In England, we drew a series, we shone with both bat and ball.”
“These type of performances happen. It’s not that we don’t know how to bat outside India. At times, oppositions play better than us and win matches. I think that’s what happened here. It’s not like the opposition batted 110 overs and we didn’t bat as many putting together both innings. In the last 4 tours outside India, go and see our records (batting numbers),” Rohit Sharma said.
In their lone batting innings, South Africa scored 408 runs, with Dean Elgar scoring 185 in the penultimate Test at SuperSport Park. He made batting look easy on a difficult pitch, while debutants David Bedingham and Marco Jansen also contributed fifty runs each. In both innings, India batted for 111.5 overs, while South Africa batted for 108.4 overs.
I Think It’s Important To Leave A Loss Like This Right Here And Not Take It To Cape Town – Rohit Sharma
Rohit Sharma also stated that he must be present with his players and offer them a shoulder to lean on following such a crushing setback and believes that it is important for the team to leave the loss behind to come back stronger in the 2nd Test.
“Absolutely, that’s the job of a captain (putting pressure). It’s not always going to be happy days on the field for the captain. It’s days like these in which a captain needs to stand up and just get around with the team, more than anything else”.
“For me also, more importantly, thinking too much about this game yes, of course, we are going to analyse what we could have done better. But, I think it’s important to leave a loss like this right here and not take it with us to Cape Town. But, yeah, we can lean from what went wrong,” Rohit Sharma added.
India’s hopes of winning their first series in South Africa were destroyed in three days, and they would be hoping to do better in Cape Town, which will host the New Year’s Test beginning January 3 and the visitors have a chance to tie the two-match series in Cape Town.