Sunil Gavaskar believes that the Indian players had been thinking too much about the pitch during their 9-wicket defeat to Australia in the third Test against Australia at Indore.
After winning the first two Test matches, and retaining the Border Gavaskar Trophy 2023 for a fourth successive time, Rohit Sharma’s men were on the verge of sealing their place in the final of the World Test Championship, instead, a defeat in Indore has seen Pat Cummins’ side progress to the WTC final in June.
The conditions in Indore were even more difficult to bat, as compared to the previous two Test matches in Delhi and Nagpur. The pitches used in the past two venues were rated ‘average’ by ICC.
In the first Test, India defeated Australia by an innings and 132 runs while in the second Test, Rohit’s side prevailed by six wickets. In both games, Cummins’ men had suffered a batting collapse in their second innings.
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In Indore however, it was the hosts who struggled to cope with the pitch as well as Australian spinners as Matthew Kuhnemann and Nathan Lyon hunted Indian batters in pairs.
With the series now standing at 2-1, ahead of the final match of the series in Ahmedabad, Gavaskar feels that the Indian team did not score enough runs.
“In the first two matches, they did not get runs. Apart from Rohit Sharma in Nagpur, they did not get enough runs. When you don’t get enough runs, there is just that little tentativeness in their batting," the legendary opener told Star Sports.
He continued, “They did not get enough runs. They were not able to go down the pitch as much as they should have. They let the pitch overtake them. It was the pitch that was playing on their minds, even more so in the second innings."
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Indian batters could only score 109 runs in the first inning as Kuhnemann took a five-wicket haul while Australia recorded 197 in reply. In their second innings, the hosts again faltered and folded for 169, thus giving Steve Smith and Co a 76-run target which they easily chased down on Day 3.
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