Playing on pitches like Indore, you need a Shreyas Iyer kind of innings: Rohit Sharma

Rohit Sharma. (Photo Source: BCCI)

After losing to Australia in the third Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, India skipper Rohit Sharma said that everyone in the team should have played counter-attacking cricket, just like Shreyas Iyer did in the second innings of the match.

The Mumbai-born cricketer also added that someone has to step up and take on the bowlers in the fourth Test at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. Rohit said that he wants his teammates to contribute more with that bat as small cameos are not working well at the moment.

“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.

We played some poor shots, we didn’t apply enough: Rohit

India were poor with the bat in both innings of the third Test as they they were bundled out for 109 and 163 in the two innings. Even though Virat Kohli and Shreyas Iyer got starts, they could not capitalise. On the other hand, KS Bharat and Ravindra Jadeja looked pretty pale. While talking about the same, Rohit stated that they played some poor shots and that they need to concentrate better 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 batsmen. We played some poor shots as well. We didn’t apply enough,” said Rohit.

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