Cheteshwar Pujara was brutal in his assessment of India’s batting innings in the ongoing second BGT 2024 Test in Adelaide. The pink-ball, day-night Test saw India captain Rohit Sharma returning to action, winning the toss and choosing to bat first.
India crashed out for 180 runs as Mitchell Starc ran riot with figures of 6/48. Nitish Reddy top-scored for India with 42 runs, while KL Rahul (37), Shubman Gill (31), and scores in the 20s by Rishabh Pant and R Ashwin pushed India towards a respectable total.
There were failures as well like Yashasvi Jaiswal getting out for a duck on the first ball of the match. Virat Kohli made 7 and Rohit Sharma made 3 runs India lost the plot after a good partnership between Rahul and Gill.
During his analysis, Pujara mentioned star batter Virat Kohli, who was dismissed for only seven runs. Pujara stated that India should have scored 250 to 275 runs on the Adelaide surface and that despite hitting the correct length, their bowlers did not perform effectively.
“I think we could have batted a lot better. It was a pitch where we should have got 250 to 275. So we are 70-80 runs behind. Credit goes to the Aussie bowlers because of the way they bowled. They pitched the ball up. Their lengths were much better than our bowlers.
I do understand that our bowlers did try to hit the same length, which wasn't the ideal length. But if you look at the Aussie bowlers' length, initially they mixed it up when there wasn't help when they started pitching up," Pujara said on Star Sports.
Pujara noted that India should have focused on developing partnerships to counter Australia's bowling threat, but instead, they lost wickets at regular intervals.
"They went to the back of length. They started bowling between 6 to 8 meters and that's where we lost a couple of wickets in the middle order. KL Rahul and Virat, both of them got outback-of-the-lengthength deliveries. And the line was still just over the 4th stump, which was an ideal line on this pitch.
So I found that I know we could have batted a lot better on this pitch, where we had partnerships, but after one partnership, we kept on losing wickets," the Indian cricket team batter explained.
Australia ended day one on 86/1 with Usman Khawaja being the lone wicket to fall.
