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Kohli surprised by England’s defensive tactics
- Updated: November 21, 2016
Virat Kohli said that England’s decision to stonewall in the second innings played into India’s hands after they secured a 246-run victory in Visakhapatnam.
Set 405 on a wearing pitch with considerable variation in bounce, Alastair Cook and Haseeb Hameed dug in for 50.2 overs to put on 75 for the opening stand. It was high-class defensive batting from two batsmen with the technique to pull off such a difficult skill but Kohli felt that, in bowler-friendly conditions, not having the “intent” to score was not the way to go.
“We thought they would come out with more intent, to be honest,” Kohli said. “And to see them approach that they had obviously gave us assurance that once we get a couple of wickets, it will crumble pretty quickly because there wasn’t much intent from the batsmen.”
India were able to break the opening stand late on the fourth day, an R Ashwin grubber pinning Hameed lbw and then, with what became the final ball of the day, Ravindra Jadeja dismissed Cook.
“It was a test of our patience,” Kohli said. “We knew that they are going to try and annoy us by playing like this and hope that we lose that our cool, bowl with different plans and do too many things, which we did not. We maintained a similar field throughout.
“It’s just that in the last over, the suggestion came from [Cheteshwar] Pujara that we could try probably a different field, have two more on the leg side and make him really defend well in the last six balls. Put a bit of doubt in his …
