The Indian team exhausted all its DRS reviews in the third Test against Australia in Indore, despite Rohit Sharma indicating before the game that the decision of going for an appeal will be done in consultation with three men - the captain, the bowler and wicketkeeper KS Bharat.
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However, as the ball got rolling, the plan fell flat. Ravindra Jadeja looked animated and convinced Rohit to appeal for a review - none of which would go India’s way.
Rohit calls the DRS tricky and terms it ‘like a lottery where if you get it right, you get it right.’ However, heading into the series-deciding fourth Test, he admits that the team will have a little discussion ahead of the game on how to handle DRS better.
“Especially Jaddu (Jadeja) yaar! Every ball he thinks its out…” a smiling Rohit said on Wednesday. “I understand, they’re quite animated, it’s just the passion of the game. But that’s where my role comes in, to say ‘ bhai (brother), relax a little, it’s okay if it’s at least ending up somewhere near the stumps, but this isn’t even hitting the stumps, and some balls were even pitching outside (leg stump)’ So, that was a silly mistake that we made but we hope to correct that in this game and we’ll have a small chat regarding this as well, and hopefully we can get it right in this game,” the India captain added.
Looking back at the Indore game, Rohit said that it was turning a lot, so the team had to look at three aspects – pitch in line, impact in line, and then, how much the ball was turning. “When we played in Delhi, it was not turning so much, so it was only the impact and probably the line where it pitched, whether it’s outside leg or in line,” Rohit said.
He also backed stumper Bharat, who just made it to the Test squad, as he is not quite used to DRS, considering the domestic games don’t use the technology.
“Yes, we accept that we didn’t make the right calls in the last game but Bharat obviously is new to DRS. He’s not kept wickets for India, so DRS is something very new. Ranji Trophy doesn’t have DRS, and India A and all of that doesn’t have DRS, so it’s something new for him as well. So we’ve just got to give him some time and make him understand what it is and all that…”
When the DRS was introduced during the previous India-Australia Test series, back in 2018, India struggled. Five years later, it seems, there’s still room for improvement and introspection. “When we played in Indore, we didn’t realise that it’s going to turn so much, so we quickly gathered our thoughts and we said, okay, this looks like it’s going to turn a bit, so we need to understand how much it turns and where the ball will eventually end up.
“So what we decided at the start of the series is, the talk usually should be between the three of us – the bowler, the captain and the wicketkeeper – but obviously, the guys who are standing in close positions where they can hear the noise, where they can pick up certain things, they can also be involved. It’s not like it’s a three-way conference. But it’s a tricky one,” Rohit said, perhaps hoping to make the right call in the series-decider.
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