Md Azharuddin expects Karun and Bhuvneshwar to play in second Test in Bengaluru

Md Azharuddin expects Karun and Bhuvneshwar to play in second Test in Bengaluru

12

Written by: SportsCafe Desk

no photo

|

Getty

Mohammad Azharuddin expects Karun Nair and Bhuvneshwar Kumar to be picked in the place of Jayant Yadav and Ishant Sharma for the second Test in Bengaluru starting this week after the hosts were outplayed by Australia in Pune in under three days on a deteriorating pitch.

“Any batting debacle leaves a team on the backfoot. I am not saying the series is lost but one needs to look at the kind of track that you want to play. I reckon Chinnaswamy (Stadium) won’t have this kind of turn. So my gut feeling is that Jayant Yadav and Ishant Sharma may be dropped from the playing XI,” ex-India skipper Azharuddin told PTI.

“Going by their batting performance, I expect them to play an extra batsman — that is Karun Nair. He should be replacing Jayant in all likelihood. Also on the tracks that we are playing, Ishant’s back of the length stuff is not going to work. It is better that a swing bowler like Bhuvneshwar is brought into the team by Virat.”

Nair had scored a triple century against England in his last Test in December but sat out of the one-off Test against Bangladesh and the first Test against Australia.

In Pune, Australia left-arm spinner Steve O’Keefe returned a match-haul of 12 wickets on a track that his counterpart Ravindra Jadeja struggled to find any sort of rhythm.

“I think a similar pitch was prepared when Michael Clarke got his 6 for 9 in Mumbai. This was a bad pitch to bat on. But I am not at all happy with how the spinners bowled on a track like this — especially Ravindra Jadeja,” said Azharuddin, who scored over 6000 runs in 99 Tests. 

“O’Keefe bowled the line that Jadeja should have bowled. If you looked at Jadeja’s line, it was on off-stump or slightly outside the off-stump trying to make use of the rough. That was where he made the mistake. On this track, Jadeja’s channel would have never got him wickets and that’s precisely what has happened.

“Now what did O’Keefe bowl? He bowled on the middle and leg line and didn’t try for big turn. The batsmen can’t leave such deliveries. As a result, he got four lbw decisions. An orthodox left-arm spinner when he is getting 4 lbws means that he was bowling straight, knowing pitch will do the rest.

“The Indians in their mind were all playing for the turn. It meant, O’Keefe read the pitch better than Jadeja. As far as Ashwin is concerned, 100 plus runs on this track is poor show.”

Get updates! Follow us on

Open all