‘On turning track, India played into our hands’

Tribune News Service

Pune, February 25

The pitch and the conspiracies and controversies it spews had stayed in the background ever since Anil Kumble took over as the head coach. The Pune pitch and the result, though, are almost certain to get the focus back on it. The team, since Kumble took over, has always maintained they don’t ask curators to prepare any particular kind of wicket, and play on whatever turf they get. To be fair, they walked the talk to a large extent against New Zealand, England and Bangladesh.

But as far as the wicket for Pune Test is concerned, it’s difficult to believe that such a pitch could have been rolled out without the team management asking for it. Or, maybe the curators had a bad day in office, and it spun out of their control. “I don’t know, I didn’t speak to anyone,” Virat Kohli said when asked if the team management had demanded a rank turner.

Regardless of how the wicket came about, the Australians aren’t complaining. In fact, they seem glad that India rolled out a rank turner as it evened out the contest. “It was up to them to prepare a wicket, and they prepared a wicket that actually played into our hands. It would be interesting to see what they come up with in Bangalore,” said Smith. “It actually evened up the contest a lot more. Our spinners were able to generate more spin and got natural variation from the wicket.”

The Indian skipper, while being forthright in accepting that it was their worst performance in recent times, was a little guarded in his views about the wicket. “I don’t think this wicket was any different from the turners we have played on in the past. It’s just that we didn’t play good cricket,” he said.

The skipper singled out their first innings batting as the main reason for the defeat. “If you lose seven wickets for 11 runs and then drop five catches of a same batsman, then you just don’t deserve to win a Test match,” he said. “Once you fall behind by 160 runs (155) one such a track, it’s very difficult to come back.”

While blaming the batsmen for the loss, the skipper chose to go easy on the bowlers. “The bowlers bowled well, they put Australia under pressure but we put them under a lot of pressure by getting out for just 105 runs in the first innings,” the skipper said. The loss has snapped India’s unbeaten streak of 19 Tests; besides, Australia’s long losing streak in India, too, has come to an end. “Coming to India, we hadn’t won a game here in 4,502 days. So this got to be very special,” said Smith.