India’s interim skipper Rohit Sharma is not a happy man right now for the way things turned out against his team.
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Neither the outcome nor the performance was what he would not have wanted on his first match as skipper at the HPCA Stadium, Dharamsala.
Following Thisara Perera’s right guess of the coin, Team India looked clearly clueless with the bat, tottering against Lanka’s all-round bowling attack.
Suranga Lakmal was the pick of the bowlers who stuck to his probe bowling variations and constantly troubled the Indian batsmen.
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Barring MS Dhoni, the other batsmen didn’t turn up. Lakmal claimed four wickets and bowled four maidens.
He gave away just 13 runs and was named as the player of the match. He admitted in the post-match presentation that he strived hard in the last 2 years to come to the highest level.
India were bundled out for a paltry 112 runs and they managed to pick 3 Sri Lankan wickets as the visitors aced the chase with relative ease by 7 wickets to take a 1-0 lead in the three-match ODI series.
Rohit Sharma at the post-match presentation spoke about India’s performance and he added saying that the team failed to add flesh to the scorecard.
“Two games to go, but having said that we weren’t up to the mark today. Had we had 70-80 runs more we could have had a game on our hands. It is important that we as a team thrive on conditions such as these and come out well. Not every day will we get flat tracks and today was a good learning curve.
Not such a great experience of losing the first match as a captain – nobody likes losing games, and we need to focus on the next two games and come out hard,” Rohit Sharma echoed.
Rohit also praised Dhoni’s efforts,
“He knows what to do in these conditions. I was not surprised. Someone batting with him would have made a big difference. There was still something in the pitch when we were bowling, but 112 was not enough runs on the board.”
