India’s collective failure with both bat and ball subjected them to a loss by an innings and 32 runs against South Africa in the Boxing Day Test in Centurion. While the visitors did well to recover to 245 owing to a magnificent KL Rahul century in the first innings, the lack of penetration from the bowlers was visible as South Africa scored 408, which skipper Rohit Sharma admitted was too many on that track. What followed in the second innings was abject surrender with the bat again as they were skittled out for just 131 with Virat Kohli being the standout.
A heavy and humiliating loss such as this can throw the spanner in the works as questions are and will be raised about any and every aspect of the team, however, skipper Rohit Sharma was careful in choosing his words regarding criticism of his team. Rohit admitted the failure of the batters and bowlers in equal measures at the post-match presentation but was quick to remind everyone of the quality of the batting.
Speaking to the reporters after the match which lasted less than three days, Rohit said, “We might have put in this performance here, but don’t forget what we did in Australia and in England. We won the series in Australia on the back of our batting. We drew the series in England through our batting and bowling both.”
Rohit said that matches like these can happen but one match won’t make their batters incompetent outside India and then reminded everyone of the results that the Indian team has been able to produce in the last four years. “These performances can happen. It doesn’t mean we don’t know how to bat outside India. Sometimes the opposition performs better than us. I think on those terms. The opposition played better than us. That’s why they won. Not that we couldn’t bat even 110 overs. Go and check the results over the last four years or last four tours,” he added.
However, the bowlers were equally responsible and Rohit mentioned that it was just one of the days as he couldn’t fault the effort they put in but apart from Jasprit Bumrah, no one got the results. Bumrah was probably the best Indian bowler on show with four wickets and even though the likes of Prasidh Krishna, Shardul Thakur and R Ashwin all had a wicket each to show for, but not in the way they would have liked as Dean Elgar and Marco Jansen, especially made them toil very hard.