‘Looks can deceive’

After thumping loss to Australia, India head coach Rahul Dravid admits team misread pitch; insists ball was stopping more when Rohit & Co were batting

Even as millions of fans still cannot get their heads around what went wrong with this Indian team that won 10-out-of-10 matches only to lose the World Cup final to Australia rather tamely, head coach Rahul Dravid had a pretty simple answer. “We were around 30-40 runs short. If we had got to 280-290 and then Australia were 60 for 3, it would have been a very different game,” said Dravid to a packed post-match media conference at the Narendra Modi Stadium late on Sunday night after India lost by six wickets.  

Not much dew in evening

The former skipper was also candid in his admission that the India camp may have misread the pitch, with Rohit Sharma revealing at the toss that he would have preferred to bat anyway had he won the coin-flip. “The pitch played really well later on. Sometimes looks can be a bit deceiving. It just felt like the ball was stopping a little bit more in the afternoon [when India were batting] than it did in the evening [during the Australian innings]. And not that there was a lot of dew either, but I felt the ball came on to the bat a lot better in the evening,” he said.

India bowling coach Paras Mhambrey couldn’t agree more. “The toss was crucial and made the difference because the way the wicket played in the first innings and then in the second, it was a contrast. The ball was coming on to the bat a lot easier for the Australians,” said the former India pacer.

Dravid however, made no bones of the fact that the Indian batting was below par on the night, but went on to explain why that happened. “We did not bat well enough, but the Australians bowled really well and used the slower deliveries nicely. Also, we are a team that enjoy hitting boundaries, but they managed the bigger side of the boundary well and we weren’t able to get boundaries [India managed to hit just two boundaries between the 11th and the 40th over]. There was a conscious effort to try and take the game deep, but we kept losing wickets. Every time we felt that we built a partnership and can start going, we lost a wicket. So, we had to get back to consolidation mode. We lost Virat [at 148-4 in 28.3 overs], then Jaddu [178-5 in 35.5] and then [KL] Rahul [203-6 in 41.3] at critical times. And at 240, they were always just one partnership away from getting there.”

Emotional dressing room  

The entire nation has felt the emotional downturn of this defeat and the Indian team’s dressing room was no different. “Rohit is very disappointed obviously as are many of the boys in the dressing room. There were a lot of emotions in that dressing room. It was tough to see as a coach because you know these boys personally and I know how hard these guys have worked, what they’ve put in, the sacrifices they’ve made. But that’s sport. We’ll reflect and move on because that’s what you do as sportsmen. You have some great highs and lows in sport. You don’t stop because if you don’t put yourself on the line, you don’t put yourself in games like these, you don’t experience the great highs or the great lows. And if you don’t, you don’t learn,” he concluded.

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