When playing on pitches like those in Indore, you need an inning like Shreyas Iyer’s: Richard Sharma

India captain Rohit Sharma remarked that everyone on the team should have played counter-attacking cricket, similar to what Shreyas Iyer did in the second innings of the match, after India lost to Australia in the third Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.

The batsman, who was born in Bombay, further stated that during the fourth Test at Ahmedabad’s Narendra Modi Stadium, someone needed to step up and challenge the bowlers. Rohit stated that little cameos are now not working well and he wants his teammates to contribute more with that bat.

“You need an innings like Shreyas Iyer when you’re playing on pitches like these. Someone must take the initiative and defeat the bowlers. You have to play cameos like that; it can’t always be that the batsmen will score 100, 90, or 80 runs, Rohit told the press.

If one of the top batters can get a big score, 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 his dismissal was somewhat unfortunate, I would say that he timed the ball really well, straight into the hands – not straight into the hands, Khawaja took a very good catch – but you need that kind of innings, he continued.

We made some mistakes and didn’t work hard enough, Rohit said. India’s performance with the bat in the third Test’s first and second innings resulted in them being bowled out for 109 and 163 respectively. Virat Kohli and Shreyas Iyer both got off to good starts, but they were unable to capitalize. KS Bharat and Ravindra Jadeja, on the other hand, were rather pale. Rohit mentioned the same thing, saying that they made some bad shots and needed to focus more in the middle.

“None of the innings went as we would have liked. There didn’t seem to be anything going on even in the opening innings. If you considered every dismissal, we performed terribly. Out of the 10 wickets in the first innings, perhaps one or two were taken because the pitch slightly aided the bowler. Other than that, the bowler’s ability to trap the batsman and dismiss the batters depended on it. We also made some terrible photographs. We didn’t put in enough effort,” Rohit said.