Team India bowling coach Paras Mhambrey defended the decision of the management to drop veteran off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin for the World Test Championship (WTC) final against Australia. He added that it was a tough decision, but conditions dictated the move as well. India’s decision to drop Ashwin from the playing XI for the WTC final, which began at The Oval on Wednesday, June 7, has been criticized by many as well as they had a poor day in the field after winning the toss and bowling first under overcast conditions. Australia finished to 327/3 by stumps on Day 1.

At a press conference following the end of the day’s play, Mhambrey said: “It’s always a very difficult decision to drop a champion bowler like that. But I thought looking at the conditions in the morning, having the additional seamer would definitely be beneficial. And it also has worked in the past. If you look at the earlier games that we’ve played, the last Test match, we went in with four seamers which did really well.”

However, none of the Indian bowlers could stop the run flow on the opening day where Mohammed Shami went for 77 runs in 20 overs, Mohammed Siraj for 67 in 19 and Umesh Yadav for 54 in 14 as well. All-rounder Shardul Thakur, who was preferred over Ashwin, gave away 75 runs in 18 overs, while Jadeja finished with the figures of 0/48 in 14 overs.

“In terms of the bowling, I thought we could have been more disciplined, definitely. I thought we started off very well for the first 12-15 overs when we really bowled in the right areas.”But maybe after a little bit, I thought we kind of weren’t disciplined about our bowling. And that’s one of the reasons I thought we conceded more runs than we ideally would have preferred,” he shared.

While talking about India’s delayed decision to pull their lengths back and tuck Travis Head up with deliveries into the body, Mhambrey said shared his views on that also.

“We always felt that that was an area that we could exploit against him. But yeah, as you said, we could have done it a little earlier, maybe 30-40 runs earlier.“But you’ve got to trust the captain. I think you also go with his instincts, and he felt maybe that the situation wasn’t right to use that kind of a strategy. But I thought we could have done it a little earlier. The second new ball that we took, we saw that the ball was getting a little seam, it was getting cut. So definitely tomorrow morning will be an important session for us.“If we pick up a few wickets quickly, then definitely we have an opportunity to come back in the game,” he concluded.