Birmingham, July 7: It is always tempting to have a wicket-taking spinner like Kuldeep Yadav in the playing eleven but Washington Sundar was preferred for the Edgbaston Test against england to add batting depth after two lower-order collapses at Leeds, India captain Shubman Gill has said.
The debatable decision to include Washington in the eleven paid off as the left-hander chipped in with both bat and ball in different stages of the game. India will go to the Lord’s Test with the same approach.
“It’s very tempting when you have a bowler like Kuldeep. One of the reasons why I wanted to play Washington was because he gives us the batting depth,” said Gill after India levelled the series with an emphatic win.“And the first thing is, I think the partnership between me and Washington is very important. If there was no partnership, then I think our lead would have been 70-80-90 runs, which is psychologically very different from 180 run lead,” he explained.
Gill feels the spinners give more control than pacers when the Dukes ball gets soft and unresponsive.
“As much as we expected, even on the fifth day, the ball was not moving that much from the middle, it was just moving from the rough.
“We thought that…maybe on our fifth day, a spinner will give us more control if the ball is moving from the wicket.
And especially on such (flat) wickets, sometimes spin gives you more control than fast bowling. So that was our mindset,” he said explaining the rationale behind Sundar and Ravindra Jadeja’s inclusion.When the ball and pitch is not offering anything, Gill reckons it becomes even more important to contain the run flow as that is the only way to put pressure on the batters.
“When the ball becomes a little soft, on a wicket that is flat, the most important thing that becomes for us as a fielding or as a bowling unit is how do we stop those runs. Because we would get that second new ball.
“And it would be relatively easier to get wickets with a harder ball or with a second new ball. And when they were, I think, 83-5 in the first innings, straight after that we went for some short balls because I wanted to take that extra risk and see if we get that wicket. And that’s where I think we leaked a lot of runs,” he added. (IANS)
