With the second loss on the trot, Team India’s chances of making it into the Asia Cup final looks worse than ever. Rohit Sharma and his men had started brilliantly and went onto beat Pakistan and Hong Kong. But a four-day break, did its trick and they quickly lost momentum. On Sunday, they lost their first Super Fours game to Pakistan and then went onto lose their second match against Sri Lanka. Now, it looks very stiff for India as they will now have to beat Afghanistan in a do or die match and then wait for the other teams to play their part to the perfection.
Meanwhile, India Test specialist Cheteswar Pujara also weighed in on with his opinion. Speaking to ESPN Cricinfo, he opined that India needs to learn to bat in a certain phase of the game.
“The overs between 6 and 15 and then we are not finishing as well because we are losing too many wickets in the middle overs and then we don’t have proper batters after the 15th over. I think we need to figure that out, learn to bat well in that period,” said Pujara on ESPNCricinfo.
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“Today we didn’t start well, lost a couple of wickets early on. But if we look at the game against Pakistan, we got off to a good start but still kept on losing wickets between 6 and 15. In the last five overs, we can’t go hard. So I think it’s the middle overs where we will have to work a bit more on our batting.”
Defending champions India went perilously close to elimination after a six-wicket defeat against Sri Lanka in their super four stage match of the Asia Cup here on Tuesday.
The result left the Men in Blue at the mercy of the other teams to have a chance of making it to the final. It also meant that India skipper Rohit Sharma’s scintillating 41-ball 72 went in vain, as the islanders completed a chase of 174 with a ball to spare.
Needing 21 in 12 balls, Sri Lanka scored 14 runs off the penultimate over bowled by Bhuvneshwar Kumar, almost sealing it in their favour.
India will be out of the tournament if Pakistan beat Afghanistan on Wednesday.
Chasing what looked like a par score at the innings break, the Sri Lankans were off to a blazing start with openers Kusal Mendis (57 off 37 balls) and Pathum Nissanka (52 off 37 balls) putting on 91 runs at a brisk rate.
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