After the victory of Lord's, hardly anyone would have thought that India's innings would be reduced to 78 runs on the very first day of Leeds. After an impressive 151-run victory, the momentum was on India's side but India were never able to recover from James Anderson's early blows, who took 3 multiple wickets in the first session of the match, which once again included the wicket of Virat Kohli.
There was a time where India's score was 3 wickets for 21 runs and it looked like England might take some more wickets but Ajinkya Rahane and Rohit Sharma put on a 35-run partnership but just before lunch, India's one more wicket falls as Ajinkya Rahane who could score only 18 runs and gets caught by Jos Buttler off Robinson's ball.
India's 56 for 4 starts the second session of the day, it was expected that the team might score more than 200 runs, but within just 22 runs, India also lost its last 6 wickets and recorded another lowest total of 78 runs in their 1st innings.
While Virat Kohli’s poor form continued, former India legend Sunil Gavaskar asked him to take Sachin Tendulkar’s advice, “He should give a quick call to SRT (Tendulkar) and ask, ‘What should I do?’ He should do what Sachin Tendulkar did at Sydney. Say to himself that I am not going to play the cover drive. That is a bit of a worry for me because he is getting dismissed at the fifth, sixth and even seventh stump. In 2014, he was getting out more around the off-stump,” said Gavaskar.
After being reduced to 78, a lot depended on India’s bowling but the hosts’ opening pair scored 120 runs by the end of the day without losing any wickets and set the course of the match quite a bit.
While talking, Zaheer Khan termed India's decision to bat first as a wrong decision,
“Today, I definitely felt that the captains had contrasting views about the pitch. During the previous two Test matches of the series, this wasn’t the case. Both skippers wanted to do the same thing in those games at the toss. But today, the conversation at the toss was contrasting as Root’s analysis of the pitch was different from that of Virat Kohli.”
Zaheer Khan further saying,
“Maybe India made a mistake in assessing the conditions. Maybe they went by the manner in which the practice wickets behaved, or their research about the history of the pitch at the venue played a role in this decision. I think Team India faltered in one of these aspects.”
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