India's captain Rishab Pant walks off the field after losing his wicket on the third day of the second cricket test match between India and South Africa in Guwahati, India, Saturday, Nov. 22, 2025. (AP Photo)“This is still a good surface. This not a pitch to be 142 for 7. Ordinary batting. India won’t be one bit happy. You have to put your hands up and say that’s very ordinary batting,” Ravi Shastri, former India coach, summarised India’s batting on day 3.
His comments came on the back of Shaun Pollock’s comments that some of the batting has been “soft” and it would have been understandable if the wickets had come “off some brilliant deliveries” and the former South African pacer ran through some of the wickets.
KL Rahul lunged at a Keshav Maharaj delivery, getting his hands rather low, and the ball popped up off the splice for a simple catch at slips. His opening partner Yashasvi Jaiswal had a ball that stopped on him perhaps, and he just check-punched it off the edge to short third man.
Sai Sudharsan, back in the playing XI, wasted a decent start, pulling a harmless delivery from the offspinner Simon Harmer to midwicket.
Dhruv Jurel, who had pulled Harmer to deep midwicket in the first Test, went for a pull shot off Marco Jansen. This was a delivery angling outside off, and he had to end up dragging it from there, and unsurprisingly it popped up to mid-on.
Rishabh Pant “ran down the wicket” in the words of Pollock. Pant went for a old-school slog, charging down to Jansen and tried to slug it across the line, only to feather an edge. For some reason, he even took a DRS that didn’t reprieve him.
Nitish Reddy stabbed a Jansen bouncer and it went off the splice towards gully and Markram ran across from the slips to take a good catch. Ravindra Jadeja tried to pull out off another bouncer from Jansen but the ball bounded off the shoulder on to the bat, and to the slips.
“Very soft dismissals,” Pollock said on JioHotstar, triggering Shastri to make his point about ordinary batting.
“Definite question marks about Indian batsmen. India don’t play a Test series next year at home. They have a long time to reassess what to do at Test match level. This performance against South Africa will definitely hurt,” Abhinav Mukund, former India opener, added.
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