Hyderabad: India head coach Rahul Dravid spoke about the team’s loss in the first Test of the series against England here.
Dravid identified Ollie Pope’s exceptional knock as the turning point in the first Test match.
The former Indian cricketer was particularly impressed with how Pope used the sweep and reverse sweep to counter India’s spinners effectively.
“We shouldn’t have been chasing 230, but Ollie Pope came out, and played a fantastic innings,” Dravid said, crediting the England batter’s knock as “the difference in the game”.
“I certainly didn’t see someone do it that consistently and successfully. Especially the reverse sweep; to play it for that long and successfully, hats off to him,” he said.
Chasing 231 for a win, India began well but lost wickets in clusters to debutant Tom Hartley and found themselves in a hole at 119/7 with Shreyas Iyer, the last of the top seven batters, edging one to the slip fielder.
Dravid, however, backed the Indian youngsters to come good despite them not stepping up in this Test match, an ICC report said.
“I won’t be so harsh to judge them today, and in fact, I think we left 70 runs on the board in the first innings. When the conditions were pretty good to bat on Day 2, we got ourselves to good starts but didn’t capitalise," Dravid said.
“We didn’t have someone getting a hundred for us. The second innings is always going to be challenging. We got close, and we have to get better," he said.
“A lot of our players are young, and these guys play a lot of white-ball cricket, and they don’t get a lot of time to play first-class cricket. They are learning,” Dravid added, reminding everyone that these players had come in after scoring runs in domestic cricket and doing well for the India A team."
"It is not that we are picking people out of nowhere, and sometimes it takes a bit of time for people to adjust,” he concluded.
Despite the loss in the first Test, Dravid remained confident that India can bounce back in the series that will have huge ramifications in the ICC World Test Championship table.
India slipped to the fifth spot after the loss, but the head coach pointed out that the spinners, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel, are more than capable of making a comeback and countering Pope’s sweeps.
“We just have to get more disciplined as to where to pitch the ball, and we will work on it,” Dravid said.
“We will get better at it, and we have some world-class spinners," he said.
“One of the good things about our spinners is that they have always bounced back. If we get our execution right in the next Test match, he (Pope) will make a mistake,” Dravid added.
