IND v AUS 2023: “We’ll continue to back him” - Rahul Dravid on struggling KL Rahul

KL Rahul has scores of 20, 17 & 1 in three innings of ongoing Australia Test series.

India head coach Rahul Dravid has said that the team management will continue to back KL Rahul, despite his poor run of form which continued in the second Test against Australia, which the hosts won by 6 wickets and went 2-0 up in the four-Test series.

KL Rahul’s wretched run of form continued as he has scores of 20, 17, and 1 in the three innings of the two Tests against Australia. He now has an average of 33.44 after 47 Tests and his last century in the format came in 2021 against South Africa and since then, it has been a huge struggle for him.

Talking about the future of KL Rahul in the Indian Team, Rahul Dravid said that the management will continue to back him and that it was just a phase.

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“I think he needs to trust his processes. This is just a phase, he has been one of our most successful overseas openers. He’s got hundreds in South Africa and England, we’ll continue to back him. I believe he has the quality and class to come out of this. It is great working with this unit, managing formats is the most difficult part. But there’s not a lot of technical coaching, just simple conversations and challenging them, and giving them a pat on the back when they do well,” Dravid said on Star Sports in a post-match interview.  

He then talked about the turning point of the match and lauded the batting partnership between Akshar Patel and R Ashwin for getting India back in the game.

“This Test match moved up and down, but today morning it moved really quickly for us. I think it was the partnership between Axar and Ashwin that changed things. We wanted to chase something close to 200-225 and that partnership enabled us to get back, or we’d have been trailing. A bit of a downer to concede too many runs in the evening, I think we bowled probably wrong and were all over the place, and they came hard at us, but we course-corrected this morning. It was just brilliant then how the game moved,” Dravid added.

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He praised the captaincy and batting of Rohit Sharma as well and said that he cares deeply about his players and has the respect of the dressing room.

“I think he has been brilliant. He has the respect of the dressing room. He is one of those guys who has been there a long time. The kind of person who doesn’t speak a lot, but when he does they all listen. He deeply cares a lot about the dressing room and the players. We are very lucky to have Rohit take over the leadership from someone like Virat.

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He’s a Bombay basher that’s grown up in the maidans. I feel he’s unlucky to get himself injured. He wasn’t there for the Test matches in South Africa and England. But he comes across as a good old-fashioned Test batsman,” Dravid said.

(Times of India inputs)