Former captain Sunil Gavaskar slammed India’s famed batting lineup after yet another poor performance in the fourth innings of the fourth Test at Southampton on Sunday.
Chasing 245 for victory, India got bowled out for 184 in their second innings to lose the fourth Test by 60 runs. England thus, took an unbeatable 3-1 lead in the five-match series by virtue of this win.
Kohli has so far scored 544 runs in the series and is the leading run-getter from either side while the next best Indian on the list is Cheteshwar Pujara, who has amassed 241 runs. The likes of Shikhar Dhawan and KL Rahul have performed miserably till now with just 158 and 113 runs respectively.
Gavaskar feels the over-reliance on Kohli to score big every time has led to India’s downfall in this series.
“When you go in with five batsmen then you are bound to be in such a situation where you rely so much only on one player, Virat Kohli to get you the big hundreds. He can’t do it every time, he’s human.
“To expect that the lower order (to save India after the top-order collapse) after that Kohli-Rahane partnership was broken, to get even another 60-70 runs was too much,” Gavaskar said after the game.
“Here (in Southampton) I think their deficiencies were shown. Earlier (at Edgbaston and Lord’s) I think the ball was moving around quite a bit so most opening batsmen would have struggled. But here in both these innings, I don’t think that was the case,” Gavaskar said.
