India have lost to Bangladesh in the 1st T20I in Delhi where Rishabh Pant took a poor DRS call. However, India captain Rohit Sharma says that he doesn’t want to comment now whether Pant is good enough to take DRS. India did not review the decision when the on-field umpire turned down the lbw appeal for Mushfiqur Rahim in the third ball of the 10th over, bowled by Chahal. Rahim was playing at six then and went on to score an unbeaten 60 to take his side to the finish line.
“Of course, Rishabh is young and he will need time to understand. It’s too soon to judge whether he can make those decisions. Plus, the bowlers as well. It’s a combination when the captain is not in the right position to make that decision,” Rohit Sharma said at the post-match conference. “When you are not in the right position (as a fielder), you have to trust your bowler and the wicketkeeper. Based on that, you have to make that decision, whichever format you play.”
“148 was a good score. We would have defended it if we were smart on the field. A couple of decisions we did not get it right on the field and that went against us. That’s where we lacked in decision making,” he said. “Whenever you lose a wicket in the first over, it’s not easy to build on that. The pitch was slightly soft, so shot-making was not that easy. We wanted something around 140-150, on batting first, that was the message.”
Rohit further said he was not worried about India’sloss and he praised Bangladesh for the win.
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“The ball was stopping and gripping a little bit. These are young players trying to get into the squad, so they need a bit of time to understand how they need to bat on such pitches. I would not call that over-cautious approach. I think we were smart but we did not get enough runs. It was good fighting total but when you defend such total, you need to keep taking wickets but they had good partnerships and that was the turning point,” he added.
Rohit, however, backed his young bowlers including Khaleel Ahmed who gave away a couple of boundaries because of which Bangledesh won easily.
“These are the guys, who did not play for a while in this format. These are bowlers we have been identified that they are the ones who can do well in this format. They have done reasonably well. They still need to understand when defending smaller targets, they need to bowl according to the plan. They will learn by playing these games. They have the talent and ability to bounce back but only time will tell if they can do that or not,” he added.
“I did not want our spinners to bowl at the back-end. I kept one over for Chahal because he has bowled in that situation before. Two right-handers, I will take that chance anytime with Chahal taking the ball away from them. So that was the idea behind keeping Khaleel for the back-end,” the stand-in captain concluded.
