“Gill is a young player, but Cheteshwar Pujara will be very disappointed with his dismissal,” Ravi Shastri slams Cheteshwar Pujara for making error in judgement in WTC final
Both Shubman Gill and Cheteshwar Pujara got out clean bowled while trying to leave the ball outside the off stump
Yesterday India lost 5 wickets at just 151 runs in their first innings in the WTC final, but what’s concerning was that Shubman Gill and Cheteshwar Pujara, both got out leaving the ball.
It’s not that it was the first occasion of batsmen getting out while leaving the ball in test match cricket. Many batsmen have got out like that, but for two top order batsmen to get out like that in the same innings in a space of few minutes was a little surprising for everyone.
The former Indian head coach Ravi Shastri was on air commentating while both those dismissals happened and he explained the reason why both Gill and Cheteshwar Pujara made error in judgement.
According to Shastri, the similarity in the dismissal of Gill and Pujara was that both didn’t cover the line of the ball in time and you can’t be leaving the ball without covering the line, particularly when the bounce is uneven.
The difference between Gill’s and Pujara’s dismissal in the opinion of Shastri was that Pujara’s front pad didn’t go across towards the line of the ball at all and there was no way he was going to cover the line of the ball without taking his front pad across.
In case of Gill, his front pad did go across, but it didn’t go across in time. Gill was perhaps a bit “lazy” with his footwork which allows the ball to go through rather than perhaps hitting his pad if he had taken his front pad across.
Ravi Shastri was not harsh on Gill, but he was harsh on Cheteshwar Pujara
Shastri, who was the head coach of the Indian team when India last toured England for a full fledged test series, was not very harsh on Gill as he insisted that Gill is only a young player and he will learn from his mistakes, but Shastri was harsh on Cheteshwar Pujara.
Shastri said that Pujara will be very, very disappointed with his dismissal because he has played enough international cricket now and even recently he has been playing county cricket in England to get used to the English conditions.
