Taylor rues conceding ‘big first-innings lead’

If it is not your day, it is likely it won’t be your evening either. On the first day of the Kolkata Test, New Zealand woke up to the news that Kane Williamson’s illness had not subsided, and that he was not going to play. Some fans might have thought a new captain might at least win the toss. The new captain, Ross Taylor, thought he had, but reality struck immediately. Match referee David Boon told him Virat Kohli had. “It was a commemorative coin,” Taylor said suggesting he didn’t quite get the “head” and “tail” on the coin right. “Thought I’d won it. Then Boonie said Kohli had won.”

For a while it did seem like a good toss to lose as the bowlers picked up early wickets, but once the Indian lower order took them across 300, it was always going to be a losing battle for New Zealand. The toss here didn’t play that big a part, though. Taylor agreed. “[Would have been] nice to bat first but don’t think that would’ve had made too much difference,” Taylor said. “They put us under pressure at times, and we weren’t able to sustain it with the bat.”

India’s first-innings score gave them a 112-run lead, which meant New Zealand couldn’t afford to attack for too long even when they had India down at 43 for 4 and 106 for 6 in the second innings. “I’d hark back to being 100 runs behind in that first innings,” Taylor said when asked of a third straight failure to run through India’s tail. “In hindsight it would have been nice to score a few more runs and if India were 3 for 40 and their lead wasn’t as much. Any time you are playing catch up from that far behind, there is a lot of what-ifs.

“We could go through every session. At …

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