4 min read
Mohammed Shami took four wickets on Day 4. (Source: AP)
Mohammed Shami expressed surprise at the kind of pitch that has been prepared for the second Test in Centurion. “I did not expect the ball would stay so low in this wicket. Till now in overseas conditions, we have not seen such slow and low bounce wickets. So I don’t know what they were thinking when they made this wicket. But whatever it is we have to play on it and the conditions are same for both teams. Tomorrow we will try to win,” he said in a press conference after the fourth day of play in Centurion.
India ended Day 4 on 35/3 chasing a target of 287. They lost KL Rahul, Murali Vijay and, most importantly, captain Virat Kohli and two of the wickets have fell thanks to the ball’s tendency to remain low on this pitch.
Batsmen of both sides had to put in a shift to get runs out of the wicket, as did the pacers to get any significant bounce. “The wicket has been slow since the beginning, even on the first day you saw that it is going low continuously. And even today, it went slow and low and you needed a lot of extra effort. We tried to give 110-120 percent. That was more important for us,” said Shami.
(Source: BCCI)
Despite Shami picking the wickets of AB de Villiers and Dean Elgar just before Lunch, he only bowled the last over of the second session. “It depends on the captain when he wants to bowl which bowler. It also depends on the conditions. I bowled before lunch so I could not bowl immediately. So the captain is also thinking that we should bowl with rotation. The plan was that whenever I will get chance I will come to bowl,” he said, “There are some stages in front of you that you want to bowl more but the captain thinks that we should get them out quickly. So you cannot mind that, but yes, sometimes you do feel inside that maybe I could have got five wickets. But if you see from team’s point of view, you will not feel like this,” he added.
South Africa’s lower order, alongwith Faf Du Plessis frustrated the Indian bowers in the second session and ensured that they swell their lead as much as possible by the time the Indian’s start their second innings. Asked if India should have attacked more, Shami said, “Today, the whole day, we were looking to give away as few runs as possible and we wanted to attack them fully. We went all out on attack and gave away as few runs as possible. We wanted to bowl in good areas as we had given them 28-run lead. So we wanted to restrict them to as low a score as possible and bowl in good areas as much as possible.”
India were once again guilty of dropping chances at the slips. “For any bowler, it is a lot of frustration when the fielder is there and edges are coming, what you want is happening but the batsman isn’t getting out. So there is a little frustration mentally but you need to be mentally strong at that stage and how long you can persist with it, that is more important. Like Quinton de Kock got three boundaries on three consecutive good balls, but I did the same again and I got result on that,” he said, “When you make a unit and get 15 guys to play for the country then you should have self belief, and mix up with each other, so that this is our best and we will make him stand in slips. It is part of the game that you will drop some catches but we are not robots or machines that we will catch all of them. We can only try and then the rest is dependent on luck.”
Stay updated with the latest sports news across Cricket, Football, Chess, and more. Catch all the action with real-time live cricket score updates and in-depth coverage of ongoing matches.
