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Cricket Players'Don't know stats but India hasn't lost much in Sydney': Pujara explains what helped India regroup after Adelaide horror
Stand-in captain Ajinkya Rahane led from the front with a gallant century as India bounced back to seal an eight-wicket-win, but what transpired between the end of the first and the beginning of the second Test is a testament to this team’s character.
When a team gets all out for 36, not many give it a chance to recover from such a confidence-denting defeat and defy all odds to win back the series. But that’s exactly what India did, producing a fairy-tale ending to arguably their best Test series of all time. On December 19, 2020, India registered their lowest Test total, but exactly a month later on January 19, 2021, the same team was basking in the glory of a second consecutive Test series win on Australian soil.
Cheteshwar Pujara, one of the key architects of the win, described how the team approached the second Test in Melbourne after being beaten convincingly in Adelaide. Stand-in captain Ajinkya Rahane led from the front with a gallant century as India bounced back to seal an eight-wicket-win, but what transpired between the end of the first and the beginning of the second Test is a testament to this team’s character.
“We were very confident that if we win the second Test, there will be pressure on them and that is exactly what happened. Jinks [Rahane] played a brilliant innings at Melbourne and we went on to win that Test match and once it was one-all, the pressure was on the Australian team because we were supposed to play at Sydney in the third match where our record was really, really good,” Pujara told senior cricket journalists Jamie Alter and Meha Bhardwaj Alter on their YouTube channel 'Cricket Fables'.
“I don’t know the stats but India hasn’t lost too many matches in Sydney. We have played really well in Sydney so it was an advantage for us moving into the third Test match and the way the guys played.”
Moving on to the SCG Test, where India escaped with a memorable draw, Pujara revealed India took confidence from the fact that they did not have a poor record at the venue. Prior to the third Test of the series, India had played 12 Tests at the SCG, winning one, losing five and drawing six. Next, upon reaching Brisbane ahead of the fourth one, while all the talk was about how Australia had never lost a Test at the Gabba, Pujara revealed the team never went off track.
“It looked like it was a good pitch but we had to bat well and we had to bowl well and the guys did a fantastic job to draw that match, and then moving to the Gabba and the way it was portrayed that Australia has never lost a Test match over there,” the India batsman added.
“They have played good cricket so there was a lot of pressure on us as well at times but I felt that guys never thought about what is going to happen. We just stuck to our process, we believed in what we had been doing and we cut out the outside noise.”
