Former India cricketer Sunil Gavaskar has lashed out at the Team India management after the Rohit Sharma-led side suffered a humiliating defeat against South Africa in the first Test. South Africa defeated India by an innings and 32 runs.
Reacting to India’s defeat, Gavaskar told Sky Sports that players were short of practice in the South African condition. The former India batter, who’s on a commentary duty with Sky Sports, said the intra squad practice match was a joke.
“You need to play practice matches after coming here. Intra-squad is a joke because would your fast bowlers bowl extremely fast to your batters, would they bowl bouncers, as they would be scared about injuring their batters,” Gavaskar said.
He also said that even Indian fast bowlers needed a couple of practice matches to get into rhythm, adding that these practice matches should be against the local teams and not against a ‘B’ team of India.
India had played an intra squad match against a junior Indian team ahead of the first Test against South Africa.
What were the learnings from this test for #TeamIndia?
Indian legend #SunilGavaskar has his say on planning the tours better and be prepared for the future 👀
Tune-in to #SAvIND 2nd Test
JAN 3, 12:30 PM | Star Sports Network#Cricket pic.twitter.com/hzZv7BbUzw— Star Sports (@StarSportsIndia) December 29, 2023
He added, “So it’s better to play against the South Africa A team or play two or three matches against a county or a state. The schedule that is made these days, where you play only Test matches with a gap of seven days in between – remove the ‘workload’ word from Indian cricket’s dictionary.”
Meanwhile, the ICC has fined India 10 percent of their match fee and deducted two crucial Test championship points for the slow over rate in the first Test.
South Africa are currently leading 1-0 in the two-match Test series.